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Abstract

Consciousness is a mongrel concept: there are a number of
very different "consciousnesses." Phenomenal consciousness is
experience; the phenomenally conscious aspect of a state is what it
is like to be in that state. The mark of access-consciousness, by
contrast, is availability for use in reasoning and rationally
guiding speech and action. These concepts are often partly or
totally conflated, with bad results. This target article uses as an
example a form of reasoning about a function of "consciousness"
based on the phenomenon of blindsight. Some information about
stimuli in the blind field is represented in the brains of
blindsight patients, as shown by their correct "guesses," but they
cannot harness this information in the service of action, and this
is said to show that a function of phenomenal consciousness is
somehow to enable information represented in the brain to guide
action. But stimuli in the blind field are BOTH access-unconscious
and phenomenally unconscious. The fallacy is: an obvious function
of the machinery of access-consciousness is illicitly transferred
to phenomenal consciousness.

INTRODUCTION

The concept of consciousness is a hybrid or better, a mongrel concept:
the word `consciousness' connotes a number of different concepts and
denotes a number of different phenomena. We reason about
"consciousness" using some premises that apply to one of the phenomena
that fall under "consciousness", other premises that apply to other
"consciousnesses" and we end up with trouble. There are many parallels
in the history of science. Aristotle used `velocity' sometimes to mean
average velocity and sometimes to mean instantaneous velocity; his
failure to see the distinction caused confusion (Kuhn, 1964). The
Florentine Experimenters of the 17th Century used a single word
(roughly translatable as "degree of heat") for temperature and for
heat, generating paradoxes. For example, when they measured "degree of
heat" by whether various heat sources could melt paraffin, heat source
A came out hotter than B, but when they measured "degree of heat" by
how much ice a heat source could melt in a given time, B was hotter
than A (Wiser and Carey, 1983). These are very different cases, but
there is a similarity, one that they share with the case of
`consciousness'. The similarity is: very different concepts are treated
as a single concept. I think we all have some tendency to make this
mistake in the case of "consciousness".

Though the problem I am concerned with appears in many lines of thought
about consciousness, it will be convenient to focus on one of them. My
main illustration of the kind of confusion I'm talking about concerns
reasoning about the [function] of consciousness. But the issue of the
function of consciousness is more of the [platform] of this paper than
its topic. Because this paper attempts to expose a confusion, it is
primarily concerned with reasoning, not with data. Long stretches of text
without data may make some readers uncomfortable, as will my fanciful
thought-experiments. But if you are interested in consciousness, if I am
right you can't afford to lose patience. A stylistic matter: because this
paper will have audiences with different concerns, I have adopted the
practice of putting items that will mainly be of technical interest to part
of the audience in footnotes. Footnotes can be skipped without losing the
thread. I now turn to blindsight and its role in reasoning about a
function of consciousness.

Patients with damage in primary visual cortex typically have "blind" areas
in their visual fields. If the experimenter flashes a stimulus in one of
those blind areas and asks the patient what he saw, the patient says
"Nothing". The striking phenomenon is that some (but not all) of these
patients are able to "guess" reliably about certain features of the
stimulus, features having to do with motion, location, direction (e.g.
whether a grid is horizontal or vertical); in "guessing", they are able to
discriminate some simple forms, if they are asked to grasp an object in the
blind field (which they say they can't see), they can shape their hands in
a way appropriate to grasping it, and there are some signs of color
discrimination. Interestingly, visual acuity (as measured, e.g. by how
fine a grating can be detected) increases further from where the patient is
looking in blindsight, the opposite of normal sight. (Blindsight was first
noticed by Poppel, et.al., 1973 and there is now a huge literature on this
and related phenomena. I suggest looking at Bornstein and Pittman, 1992
and Milner and Rugg, 1992.)

Consciousness in some sense is apparently missing (though see McGinn, 1991
p 112 for an argument to the contrary), and with it, the ability to deploy
information in reasoning and rational control of action. For example, Tony
Marcel (1986) observed that a thirsty blindsight patient would not reach
for a glass of water in his blind field. (One has to grant Marcel some
"poetic license" in this influential example, since blindsight patients
appear to have insufficient form perception in their blind fields to pick
out a glass of water.) It is tempting to argue (Marcel,1986, 1988; Baars
1988; Flanagan 1991, 1992; van Gulick 1989) that since consciousness is
missing in blindsight, consciousness must have a function of somehow
enabling information represented in the brain to be used in reasoning,
reporting and rationally guiding action. I mean the "rationally" to
exclude the "guessing" kind of guidance of action that blindsight patients
[are] capable of in the case of stimuli presented to the blind field.
The idea is that when a content is not conscious--as in the blindsight
patient's blindfield perceptual contents, it can influence behavior in
various ways, but only when the content is conscious does it play a
[rational] role; and so consciousness must be involved in promoting this
rational role.

A related argument is also tempting: Robert van Gulick (1989) and John
Searle (1992) discuss Penfield's observations of epileptics who have a
seizure while walking, driving or playing the piano. The epileptics
continue their activities in a routinized, mechanical way despite, it is
said, a total lack of consciousness. Searle says that since both
consciousness and also flexibility and creativity of behavior are missing,
we can conclude that a function of consciousness is to somehow promote
flexibility and creativity. These two arguments are the springboard for
this paper. Though some variants of this sort of reasoning have some
merit, they are often given more weight than they deserve because of a
persistent fallacy involving a conflation of two very different concepts of
consciousness.

The plan of the paper is as follows: in the next section, I will briefly
discuss some other syndromes much like blindsight, and I will sketch one
model that has been offered for explaining these syndromes. Then, in the
longest part of the paper I will distinguish the two concepts of
consciousness whose conflation is the root of the fallacious arguments.
Once that is done, I will sketch what is wrong with the target reasoning
and also what is right about it, and I will conclude with some remarks on
how it is possible to investigate empirically what the function of
consciousness is without having much of an idea about the scientific nature
of consciousness.

OTHER SYNDROMES AND SCHACTER'S MODEL

To introduce a second blindsight-like syndrome, I want to first explain
a syndrome that is not like blindsight: prosopagnosia ([prosop] for
face, [agnosia] = neurological deficit in recognizing). Prosopagnosics
are unable visually to recognize their closest relatives--even pictures
of themselves, though usually they have no trouble recognizing their
friends via their voices, or, according to anecdotal reports, visually
recognizing people by recognizing characteristic motions of their
bodies. Although there is wide variation from case to case,
prosopagnosia is compatible with a high degree of visual ability, even
in tasks involving faces.

One patient who has been studied by my colleagues in the Boston area is LH,
a Harvard undergraduate who emerged from a car accident with very localized
brain damage that left him unable to recognize even his mother. His
girl-friend began to wear a special ribbon so that he would know who she
was. Now, years later, he still cannot identify his mother or his wife and
children from photographs (Etcoff, et.al. 1991). Still, if shown a photo,
and asked to choose another photo of the same person from a set of, say,
five photos presented simultaneously with the original, LH can do almost as
well as normal people despite differences between the target and matching
photos in lighting, angle and expression.

Now we are ready for the analog of blindsight. There are many
indicators that, in the case of some (but not all) prosopagnosics, the
information about whose face is being presented is "in there somewhere".
For example, some prosopagnosics are faster at matching simultaneously
presented faces when the faces are "familiar" (i.e. faces that the patient
has seen often--Reagan, or John Wayne, or the patient's relatives, for
example). Another measure involves "semantic priming" in which the
presentation of one stimulus facilitates the subject's response to a
related stimulus. For example, if normal people are asked to press a
button when a familiar face appears in a series of faces rapidly presented
one after another, the button tends to be pressed faster if a related name
has been presented very recently. E.g. `Prince Charles' facilitates
reactions to Lady Di's face. Likewise, one name primes another, and one
face facilitates reactions to the other's name. Here is the result: in a
few prosopagnosics who have been studied in detail and who exhibit some of
the other indications of "covert knowledge" of faces, faces prime related
names in the same pattern as in normals despite the prosopagnosics'
insistence that they have no idea who the faces belong to. The phenomenon
appears in many experimental paradigms, but I will mention only this: It
has recently been discovered (by Sergent and Poncet, 1990) that some
prosopagnosics are very good at "guessing" as between two names in the same
occupational category (`Reagan' and `Bush') of a person whose face they
claim is unfamiliar. (See Young and de Haan, 1993 and Young, 1994a,b for a
description of these phenomena.) Interestingly, LH, the patient mentioned
above does not appear to have "covert knowledge" of the people whose faces
he sees, but he does appear to have "covert knowledge" of their facial
expressions (Etcoff, et. al. 1992).

Many such phenomena in brain-damaged patients have now been explored using
the techniques of cognitive and physiological psychology. Further, there
are a variety of such phenomena that occur in normals, you and me. For
example, suppose that you are given a string of words and asked to count
the vowels. This can be done so that you will have no conscious
recollection or even recognition of the words and you will be unable to
"guess" which words you have seen at a level above chance. However, if I
give you a series of word-stems to complete according to your whim, your
likelihood of completing `rea-' as `reason' is greater if `reason' is one
of the words that you saw, even if you don't recall or recognize it as one
of the words you saw. See Bowers and Schacter, 1990, and Reingold and
Merikle, 1990. The phenomenon just mentioned is very similar to phenomena
involving "subliminal perception", in which stimuli are degraded or
presented very briefly. Holender (1986) harshly criticises a variety of
"subliminal perception" experiments, but the experimental paradigm just
mentioned and many others, are in my judgement, free from the problems of
some other studies. Another such experimental paradigm is the familiar
dichotic listening experiments in which subjects wear headphones in which
different programs are played to different ears. If they are asked to pay
attention to one program, they can report only superficial features of the
unattended program, but the unattended program influences interpretation of
ambiguous sentences presented in the attended program. See Lackner and
Garrett, 1973.

Recall that the target reasoning, the reasoning I will be saying is
importantly confused (but also importantly right) is that since when
consciousness is missing, subjects cannot report or reason about the
non-conscious contents or use them to guide action, a function of
consciousness is to facilitate reasoning, reporting and guiding action.
This reasoning is [partially] captured in a model suggested by Daniel
Schacter (1989--see also Schacter, et.al., 1988) in a paper reviewing
phenomena such as the ones described above. Figure 1 is derived from
Schacter's model.

[THESE ARE FIGURE CAPTIONS ONLY: FIGURES THEMSELVES ARE ONLY AVAILABLE
IN THE PAPER VERSION]

The model is only partial (that is, it models some aspects of the mind, but
not others), and so may be a bit hard to grasp for those who are used to
seeing inputs and outputs. Think of the hands and feet as connected to the
Response System box, and the eyes and ears as connected to the specialized
modules. (See Schacter, 1989, for some indication of how these suggestions
are oversimple.) The key feature of the model is that it contains a box for
something called "phenomenal consciousness"; I'll say more about phenomenal
consciousness later, but for now, let me just say that phenomenal
consciousness is experience; what makes a state phenomenally conscious is
that there is something "it is like" (Nagel, 1974) to be in that state.
The model dictates that the phenomenal consciousness module has a function:
it is the gateway between the special purpose "knowledge" modules and the
central Executive system that is in charge of direct control of reasoning,
reporting and guiding action. So a function of consciousness on this model
includes integrating the outputs of the specialized modules and
transmitting the integrated contents to mechanisms of reasoning and control
of action and reporting.

I will be using this model as a focus of discussion, but I hope that my
endorsement of its utility as a focus of discussion will not be taken as an
endorsement of the model itself. I have no commitment to a single
executive system or even to a phenomenal consciousness module. One can
accept the idea of phenomenal consciousness as distinct from any cognitive
or functional or intentional notion while frowning on a modular treatment
of it. Perhaps, for example, phenomenal consciousness is a feature of the
whole brain.

Many thinkers will hate any model that treats phenomenal consciousness as
something that could be accomplished by a distinct system. See, for
example, Dennett and Kinsbourne's (1992b) scorn in response to my
suggestion of Cartesian Modularism. I should add that in Dennett's more
recent writings, Cartesian materialism has tended to expand considerably
from its original meaning of a literal place in the brain at which "it all
comes together" for consciousness. In reply to Shoemaker 1993 and Tye
1993, both of whom echo Dennett's (1991) and Dennett's and Kinsbourne's
(1992a) admission that no one really is a proponent of Cartesian
materialism, Dennett 1993 says "Indeed, if Tye and Shoemaker want to see a
card-carrying Cartesian materialist, each may look in the mirror..." See
also Jackson 1993. I call that feature Cartesian Modularism, by analogy
to the Cartesian Materialism of Dennett and Kinsbourne (1992a), the view
that consciousness occupies a literal place in the brain. Modules are
individuated by their function, so the point of the box's place between the
specialized modules and the Executive system is to indicate that there is a
single system that has the function of talking to the specialized modules
and integrating their outputs, and talking to the Executive System, passing
on information from the specialized modules. But there is an additional
point in [calling] that system the phenomenal consciousness system,
namely to say that phenomenal consciousness is somehow involved in
performing that function. The idea is that phenomenal consciousness
[really does] something, it is involved somehow in powering the wheels
and pulleys of access to the Executive system. This is a substantive
claim, one that is distinct from the claims that phenomenal consciousness
is [correlated] with that information processing function, or that
phenomenal consciousness should be [identified] with that information
processing function. The idea is that phenomenal consciousness is distinct
(at least conceptually) from that information processing function, but is
part of the implementation of it.

Martha Farah (1994) criticizes this model on the ground that we don't
observe patients whose blindsight-like performance is up to the standard of
normal vision. Blindsight and its analogs are always degraded in
discriminatory capacity. Her assumption seems to be that if there is a
phenomenal consciousness module, it could simply be by-passed without
decrement in performance; and the fact that this is not observed is taken
as reason to reject the phenomenal consciousness module. She appears to
think that if there is a phenomenal consciousness module, then phenomenal
consciousness [doesn't do any information processing] (except, I guess,
for determining reports of phenomenal consciousness), for otherwise why
assume that it could be bypassed without decrement in performance. But why
assume that? For example, phenomenal consciousness might be like the water
in a hydraulic computer. You don't expect the computer to just work
normally without the water. Even if there could be an electrical computer
that is isomorphic to the hydraulic computer but works without water, one
should not conclude that the water in the hydraulic system does nothing. I
will return to this issue later.

One reason that many philosophers would hate Cartesian Modularist models is
that such models may be regarded as licensing the possibility of "zombies",
creatures which have information processing that is the same as ours but
which have no phenomenal consciousness. If the phenomenal consciousness
module could be replaced by a device that had the same information
processing effects on the rest of the system, but without phenomenal
consciousness, the result would be a zombie. My view is that we now know
so little about the scientific nature of phenomenal consciousness and its
function that we cannot judge whether the same function could be performed
by an ersatz phenomenal consciousness module--that is, whether an ersatz
phenomenal consciousness module could inject its representations with
ersatz conscious content that would affect information processing the same
way as real conscious content. There is much of interest to be said about
this idea and its relation to other ideas that have been mentioned in the
literature, but I have other fish to fry, so I leave the matter for another
time.

The information processing function of phenomenal consciousness in
Schacter's model is the ground of the concept of consciousness that I will
mainly be contrasting with phenomenal consciousness, what I will call
"access-consciousness". A perceptual state is access-conscious roughly
speaking if its content--what is represented by the perceptual state--is
processed via that information processing function, that is, if its content
gets to the Executive system, whereby it can be used to control reasoning
and behavior.

Schacter's model is useful for my purposes both because it can be used to
illustrate the contrast between phenomenal and access-consciousness and
because it allows us to see one possible explanation of the "covert
knowledge" syndromes just described. This explanation (and also Schacter's
model) are certainly incomplete and no doubt wildly oversimple at best, but
it is nonetheless useful to see the rough outlines of how an account might
go. In addition, there is an association between Schacter's model and the
target reasoning--though as we shall see there is another processing model
that perhaps better embodies the target reasoning.

Consider a blindsight patient who has just had a vertical line displayed in
his blind field. "What did you see?" "Nothing", says the patient. "Guess
as between a vertical and a horizontal line" says the experimenter.
"Vertical" says the patient, correctly. Here's a story about what
happened. One of the specialized modules is specialized for spatial
information; it has some information about the verticality of the stimulus.
The pathways between this specialized module and the phenomenal
consciousness system have been damaged, creating the "blind field", so the
patient has no phenomenally conscious experience of the line, and hence his
Executive system has no information about whether the line is vertical or
horizontal. But the specialized module has a direct connection to the
response system, so when the subject is given a binary choice, the
specialized module can somehow directly affect the response. Similarly,
there is a specialized module for face information, which can have some
information about the face that has been presented to a prosopagnosic. If
the prosopagnosia is caused by damage in the link between the face module
and the phenomenal consciousness system, then that prevents the face
information from being phenomenally conscious, and without phenomenal
consciousness, the Executive system does not get the information about the
face. When the prosopagnosic guesses as between `Reagan' and `Bush', the
face module somehow directly controls the response. (It is assumed that
the face-module has information about people--e.g. their names--linked to
representations of their faces.) It is interesting in this regard that the
patients who do best in these experiments are the ones judged to be the
most "passive" (Marcel, 1983, p. 204; Weiskranz, 1988). One can speculate
that in a laid-back subject, the Executive does not try out a guessing
strategy, and so peripheral systems are more likely to affect the response.

Alexia is a neurological syndrome whose victims can no longer read a word
"at a glance", but can only puzzle out what word they have seen at a rate
of, e.g. a second per letter. Nonetheless, these subjects often show
various kinds of understanding of the meanings of words that have been
flashed far too briefly for them to read in their laborious way. The idea,
once again, is that one of the specialized modules is specialized for
lexical information, and this module has information about words that the
subject cannot consciously read. This information somehow affects
responses. Landis et.al. (1980) report that such a patient actually became
worse at "guesses" having to do with the meanings of "unread" words as his
explicit reading ability improved (Young and de Haan, 1993). Again,
perhaps once the Executive has more information, it "takes over",
preventing peripheral systems from controlling responses. Coslett and
Saffran (1994) report that alexics did worse at "guessing" words with
longer exposures. An exposure of 250 ms was better than an exposure of 2
sec. Again, longer exposures may give the executive system a chance to try
to read letter by letter.

Schacter's model and the explanation I have just sketched are highly
speculative; my purposes in appealing to them are heuristic.

TWO CONCEPTS OF CONSCIOUSNESS

First, consider phenomenal consciousness, or P-consciousness, as I will
call it. Let me acknowledge at the outset that I cannot define
P-consciousness in any remotely non-circular way. I don't consider this an
embarrassment. The history of reductive definitions in philosophy should
lead one not to expect a reductive definition of anything. But the best
one can do for P-consciousness is in some respects worse than for many
other things because really all one can do is [point] to the phenomenon
(cf. Goldman, 1993a). Nonetheless, it is important to point properly.
John Searle, acknowledging that consciousness cannot be defined
non-circularly, defines it as follows:
< By consciousness I simply mean those subjective states of
awareness or sentience that begin when one wakes in the morning and
continue throughout the period that one one is awake until one falls into a
dreamless sleep, into a coma, or dies or is otherwise, as they say,
unconscious. [This comes from Searle 1990b; there is a much longer attempt
along the same lines in his 1992, p. 83ff.]> I will argue that this sort
of pointing is flawed because it points to too many things, too many
different consciousnesses.

So how should we point to P-consciousness? Well, one way is via rough
synonyms. As I said, P-consciousness is experience. P-conscious
properties are experiential properties. P-conscious states are
experiential states, that is, a state is P-conscious if it has experiential
properties. The totality of the experiential properties of a state are
"what it is like" to have it. Moving from synonyms to examples, we have
P-conscious states when we see, hear, smell, taste and have pains.
P-conscious properties include the experiential properties of sensations,
feelings and perceptions, but I would also include thoughts, wants and
emotions. But what is it about thoughts that makes them P-conscious?
One possibility is that it is just a series of mental images or
subvocalizations that make thoughts P-conscious. Another possibility is
that the contents themselves have a P-conscious aspect independently of
their vehicles. See Lormand, forthcoming. A feature of P-consciousness
that is often missed is that differences in intentional content often make
a P-conscious difference. What it is like to hear a sound as coming from
the left differs from what it is like to hear a sound as coming from the
right. P-consciousness is often representational. (See Jackendoff, 1987;
van Gulick, 1989; McGinn, 1991, Ch 2; Flanagan, 1992, Ch 4; Goldman,
1993b.) So far, I don't take myself to have said anything terribly
controversial. The controversial part is that I take P-conscious
properties to be distinct from any cognitive, intentional, or functional
property. (Cognitive = essentially involving thought; intentional
properties = properties in virtue of which a representation or state is
about something; functional properties = e.g. properties definable in terms
of a computer program. See Searle, 1983 on intentionality; See Block,
1980,1994a for better characterizations of a functional property.) But I
am trying hard to limit the controversiality of my assumptions. Though I
will be assuming that functionalism about P-consciousness is false, I will
be pointing out that limited versions of many of the points I will be
making can be acceptable to the functionalist. I say both that
P-consciousness is not an intentional property and that intentional
differences can make a P-conscious difference. My view is that although
P-conscious content cannot be reduced to intentional content, P-conscious
contents often have an intentional aspect, and also P-conscious contents
often represent in a primitive non-intentional way. A perceptual
experience can represent space as being filled in certain ways without
representing the object perceived [as] falling under any concept. Thus,
the experiences of a creature which does not possess the concept of a donut
could represent space as being filled in a donut-like way. See Davies
(1992, forthcoming), Peacocke (1992), and finally Evans (1982), in which
the distinction between conceptualized and non-conceptualized content is
first introduced.

It is of course P-consciousness rather than access-consciousness or
self-consciousness that has seemed such a scientific mystery. The magazine
[Discover] (November, 1992) devoted an issue to the ten great unanswered
questions of science, such as "What is Consciousness?", "Does Chaos Rule
the Cosmos?" and "How Big is the Universe?" The topic was P-consciousness,
not, e.g. self-consciousness.

By way of homing in on P-consciousness, it is useful to appeal to what may
be a contingent property of it, namely the famous "explanatory gap". To
quote T.H. Huxley (1866), "How it is that anything so remarkable as a state
of consciousness comes about as a result of irritating nervous tissue, is
just as unaccountable as the appearance of Djin when Aladdin rubbed his
lamp." Consider a famous neurophysiological theory of P-consciousness
offered by Francis Crick and Christoff Koch: namely, that a synchronized
35-75 hertz neural oscillation in the sensory areas of the cortex is at the
heart of phenomenal consciousness. No one has produced the concepts that
would allow us to explain why such oscillations might be the physiological
basis of phenomenal consciousness.

However, Crick and Koch have offered a sketch of an account of how the
35-75 hertz oscillation might contribute to a solution to the "binding
problem". Suppose one simultaneously sees a red square moving to the right
and a blue circle moving to the left. Different areas of the visual cortex
are differentially sensitive to color, shape, motion, etc. so what binds
together redness, squareness and rightward motion? That is, why don't you
see redness and blueness without seeing them as belonging with particular
shapes and particular motions? And why aren't the colors normally seen as
bound to the wrong shapes and motions? Representations of colors, shapes
and motions of a single object are supposed to involve oscillations that
are in phase with one another but not with representations of other
objects. But even if the oscillation hypothesis deals with the
informational aspect of the binding problem (and there is some evidence
against it), how does it explain [what it is like to see something as red
in the first place]--or for that matter, as square or as moving to the
right? Why couldn't there be brains functionally or physiologically just
like ours, including oscillation patterns, whose owners' experience was
different from ours or who had no experience at all? (Note that I don't say
that there [could be] such brains. I just want to know [why not.]) And
why is it a 35-75 hertz oscillation--as opposed to some other
frequency--that underlies experience? If the synchronized neural
oscillation idea pans out as a solution to the binding problem, no doubt
there will be some answer to the question of why [those] frequencies, as
opposed to, say 110 hertz, are involved. But will that answer explain why
110 hertz oscillations don't underly experience? No one has a clue how to
answer these questions. Levine (1983) coined the term "explanatory
gap", and has elaborated the idea in interesting ways; see also his (1993).
Van Gulick (1993) and Flanagan (1992, p. 59) note that the more we know
about the connection between (say) hitting middle C on the piano and the
resulting experience, the more we have in the way of hooks on which to hang
something that could potentially close the explanatory gap. Some
philosophers have adopted what might be called a deflationary attitude
towards the explanatory gap. See Levine (1993), Jackson (1993) and
Chalmers (1993), Byrne (1993) and Block (1994).

The explanatory gap in the case of P-consciousness contrasts with our
relatively good understanding of cognition. We have two serious research
programs into the nature of cognition, the classical "language of thought"
paradigm, and the connectionist research program. Though no doubt there
are many ideas missing in our understanding of cognition, we have no
difficulty seeing how pursuing one or both of these research programs could
lead to an adequate theoretical perspective on cognition. But it is not
easy to see how current approaches to P-consciousness [could] yield an
account of it. Indeed, what passes for research programs on consciousness
just [is] a combination of cognitive psychology and explorations of
neuropsychological syndromes that contain no theoretical perspective on
what P-consciousness actually is.

I mentioned the explanatory gap partly by way of pointing at
P-consciousness: [that's] the entity to which the mentioned explanatory
gap applies. Perhaps this identification is contingent; at some time in
the future, when we have the concepts to conceive of much more about the
explanation of P-consciousness, this may not be a way of picking it out.
(See McGinn (1991) for a more pessimistic view.)

What I've been saying about P-consciousness is of course controversial in a
variety of ways, both for some advocates and some opponents of some notion
of P-consciousness. I have tried to steer clear of some controversies,
e.g. controversies over inverted and absent qualia; over Jackson's (1986)
Mary (the woman who is raised in a black and white room, learning all the
physiological and functional facts about the brain and color vision, but
nonetheless discovers a new fact when she goes outside the room for the
first time and learns what it is like to see red); and even Nagel's view
that we cannot know what it is like to be a bat. I know some will
think that I invoked inverted and absent qualia a few paragraphs above when
I described the explanatory gap as involving the question of why a creature
with a brain with a physiological and functional nature like ours couldn't
have different experience or none at all. But the spirit of the question
as I asked it allows for an answer that explains why such creatures cannot
exist, and thus there is no presupposition that these are real
possibilities. Levine (1983, 1993) stresses that the relevant modality is
epistemic possibility. Even if you think that P-consciousness as I have
described it is an incoherent notion, you may be able to agree with the
main point of this paper, which is that a great deal of confusion arises as
a result of confusing P-consciousness with something else. Not even the
concept of what time it is now on the sun is so confused that it cannot
itself be confused with something else.

ACCESS-CONSCIOUSNESS

I now turn to the non-phenomenal notion of consciousness that is most
easily and dangerously conflated with P-consciousness:
access-consciousness. I will characterize access-consciousness, give some
examples of how it is at least possible to have access-consciousness
without phenomenal consciousness and vice versa, and then go on to the main
theme of the paper, the damage done by conflating the two.

A state is access-conscious (A-conscious) if, in virtue of one's having the
state, a representation of its content is (1) inferentially promiscuous
(Stich, 1978), i.e. poised to be used as a premise in reasoning, and (2)
poised for [rational] control of action and (3) poised for rational
control of speech. (I will speak of both states and their contents as
A-conscious.) These three conditions are together sufficient, but not all
necessary. I regard (3) as not necessary (and not independent of the
others), since I want to allow non-linguistic animals, e.g. chimps, to
have A-conscious (access-conscious) states. I see A-consciousness as a
cluster concept, in which (3)--roughly, reportability--is the element of
the cluster with the smallest weight, though (3) is often the best
practical guide to A-consciousness. What if an A-[un]conscious state
causes an A-conscious state with the same content? Then it could be said
that the first state must be A-conscious because it is in virtue of having
[that] state that the content it shares with the other state satisfies
the three conditions. So the state is A-unconscious by hypothesis, but
A-conscious by my definition. (I am indebted to Paul Horwich.) I think
what this case points to is a refinement needed in the notion of "in virtue
of". One does not want to count the inferential promiscuity of a content
as being in virtue of having a state if that state can only cause this
inferential promiscuity via another state. I won't try to produce an
analysis of `in virtue of' here.

Although I make a firm distinction between A-consciousness and
P-consciousness, I also want to insist that they interact. For example,
what perceptual information is being accessed can change figure to ground
and conversely, and a figure-ground switch can affect one's phenomenal
state. For example, attending to the feel of the shirt on your neck,
accessing those perceptual contents, switches what was in the background to
the foreground, thereby changing one's phenomenal state. (See Hill, 1991,
118-126; Searle, 1992.)

After further explicating A-consciousness, I will argue that
A-consciousness plays a deep role in our ordinary `consciousness' talk and
thought. However, I must admit at the outset that this role allows for
substantial indeterminacy in the concept itself. In addition, there are
some loose ends in the characterization of the concept which cannot be tied
up without deciding about certain controversial issues, to be mentioned
below. I have been using the P-consciousness/A-consciousness
distinction in my lectures for many years, but it only found its way into
print in my "Consciousness and Accessibility" (1990b), and my (1991, 1992,
1993). My claims about the distinction have been criticized in Searle
(1990b, 1992) and Flanagan (1992); and there is an illuminating discussion
in Humphreys and Davies (1993b), a point of which will be taken up in a
footnote to follow. See also Levine's (1994) review of Flanagan which
discusses Flanagan's critique of the distinction. See also Kirk (1992) for
an identification of P-consciousness with something like A-consciousness.
My guide in making precise the A-consciousness/P-consciousness distinction
is the purpose of the moment, namely to reveal the fallacy in the target
reasoning. The target reasoning (in one form) says that the blindsight
patient lacks consciousness of stimuli in the blind field, and that is why
he does not use information he actually has about these stimuli, so the
function of consciousness must be to harness information for use in guiding
action. (Maybe the blindsight patient does not lack P-consciousness of
these stimuli, but the target reasoning supposes it, and it is
independently plausible. For example, Cowie and Stoerig, 1992, point out
that the removal of primary visual cortex in these patients disrupts the
Crick and Koch 40 hertz oscillations. That is some reason to believe that
the blindsight patient lacks P-consciousness of the stimuli.) I will be
pointing out that something [else] is also problematic in blindsight that
can equally well be blamed for the blindsight patient's failure, namely the
machinery of A-consciousness. Of course, the missing P-consciousness may
be responsible for the missing A-consciousness; no fallacy is involved in
that hypothesis. Rather, the fallacy is [sliding] from an obvious
function of A-consciousness to an un-obvious function of P-consciousness.)
For that reason, I choose to adopt a notion of access on which the
blindsight patient's guesses don't count as access. There is no right or
wrong here. Access comes in various degrees and kinds, and my choice here
is mainly determined by the needs of the argument. (I also happen to think
that the notion I characterize is more or less the one that plays a big
role in our thought, but that won't really be a factor in my argument.)

I will mention three main differences between P-consciousness and
A-consciousness. The first point, [put crudely], is that P-conscious
content is phenomenal, whereas A-conscious content is representational. It
is of the essence of A-conscious content to play a role in reasoning, and
only representational content can figure in reasoning. The reason this way
of putting the point is crude is that many phenomenal contents are [also]
representational. So what I really want to say is that it is in virtue of
its phenomenal content or the phenomenal aspect of its content that a state
is P-conscious, whereas it is in virtue of its representational content, or
the representational aspect of its content that a state is
A-conscious. Some may say that only fully conceptualized content can
play a role in reasoning, be reportable, and rationally control action. If
so, then non-conceptualized content is not A-conscious.

(In the last paragraph, I used the notion of P-conscious [content].
The P-conscious content of a state is the totality of the state's
experiential properties, what it is like to be in that state. One can
think of the P-conscious content of a state as the state's experiential
"value" by analogy to the representational content as the state's
representational "value". In my view, the content of an experience can be
both P-conscious and A-conscious; the former in virtue of its phenomenal
feel and the latter in virtue of its representational properties.)

A closely related point: A-conscious states are necessarily transitive:
A-conscious states must always be states of consciousness [of].
P-conscious states, by contrast, sometimes are and sometimes are not
transitive. P-consciousness, as such, is not consciousness of. (I'll
return to this point in a few paragraphs.)

Second, A-consciousness is a functional notion, and so A-conscious content
is system-relative: what makes a state A-conscious is what a representation
of its content does in a system. P-consciousness is not a functional
notion. However, I acknowledge the empirical possibility that the
scientific nature of P-consciousness is something to do with information
processing. We can ill afford to close off empirical possibilities given
the difficulty of solving the mystery of P-consciousness. Cf. Loar,
1990. In terms of Schacter's model, content gets to be P-conscious because
of what happens [inside] the P-consciousness module. But what makes
content A-conscious is not anything that could go on [inside] a module,
but rather informational relations [among] modules. Content is
A-conscious in virtue of (a representation with that content) reaching the
Executive system, the system that is in charge of rational control of of
action and speech, and to that extent, we could regard the Executive module
as the A-consciousness module; but to regard [anything] as an
A-consciousness module is misleading, because what makes content
A-conscious depends on informational relations between the Executive and
other modules.

A third difference is that there is such a thing as a P-conscious [type]
or [kind] of state. For example the feel of pain is a P-conscious
type--every pain must have that feel. But any particular token thought
that is A-conscious at a given time could fail to be accessible at some
other time, just as my car is accessible now, but will not be later when my
wife has it. A state whose content is informationally promiscuous now may
not be so later.

The paradigm P-conscious states are sensations, whereas the paradigm
A-conscious states are "propositional attitude" states like thoughts,
beliefs and desires, states with representational content expressed by
"that" clauses. (E.g. the thought that grass is green.) However, as I
said, thoughts often are P-conscious and perceptual experiences often have
representational content. For example, a perceptual experience may have
the representational content [that there is a red square in front of me].
Even pain typically has [some] kind of representational content. Pains
often represent something (the cause of the pain? the pain itself?) as
somewhere (in the leg). A number of philosophers have taken the view that
the content of pain is [entirely] representational. (See Dretske, 1994;
Shoemaker, 1994; Tye, forthcoming-b.) I don't agree with this view, so
I certainly don't want to rely on it here, but I also don't want to make
the existence of cases of P-consciousness without A-consciousness any kind
of trivial consequence of an idiosyncratic set of definitions. To the
extent that representationalism of the sort just mentioned is plausible,
one can regard a pain as A-conscious if its representational content is
inferentially promiscuous, etc. Alternatively, we could take the
A-conscious content of pain to consist in the content that one has a pain
or that one has a state with a certain phenomenal content. On my view,
there are a number of problems with the first of these suggestions. One of
them is that perhaps the representational content of pain is [too
primitive] for a role in inference. Arguably, the representational content
of pain is non-conceptualized. After all, dogs can have pain and one can
reasonably wonder whether dogs have the relevant concepts at all. Davies
and Humphreys (1993b) discuss a related issue. Applying a suggestion of
theirs about the higher order thought notion of consciousness to
A-consciousness, we could characterize A-consciousness of a state with
non-conceptualized content as follows: such a state is A-conscious if, in
virtue of one's having the state, its content [would be] inferentially
promiscuous and available for rational control of action and speech [if]
the subject [were to have had] the concepts required for that content to
be a conceptualized content. The idea is to bypass the inferential
disadvantage of non-conceptualized content by thinking of its accessibility
[counterfactually]--in terms of the rational relations it would have if
the subject [were] to have the relevant concepts. See Lormand
(forthcoming) on the self-representing nature of pain.

There is a familiar distinction, alluded to above, between `consciousness'
in the sense in which we speak of a state as being a conscious state
(intransitive consciousness) and consciousness of] something (transitive
consciousness). (See, for example, Rosenthal, 1986. Humphrey (1992)
mentions that the intransitive usage is much more recent, only 200 years
old.) It is easy to fall into an identification of P-consciousness with
intransitive consciousness and a corresponding identification of

access-consciousness with transitive consciousness. Such an
identification is oversimple. As I mentioned earlier, P-conscious contents
can be representational. Consider a perceptual state of seeing a square.
This state has a P-conscious content that represents something, a square,
and thus it is a state of P-consciousness of] the square. It is a state
of P-consciousness of the square even if it doesn't represent the square
[as] a square, as would be the case if the perceptual state is a state of
an animal that doesn't have the concept of a square. Since there can be
P-consciousness [of] something, P-consciousness is not to be identified
with intransitive consciousness.

Here is a second reason why the transitive/intransitive distinction cannot
be identified with the P-consciousness/A-consciousness distinction: The
[of]-ness required for transitivity does not guarantee that a content be
utilizable by a consuming] system at the level required for
A-consciousness. For example, a perceptual state of a brain-damaged
creature might be a state of P-consciousness of, say, motion, even though
connections to reasoning and rational control of action are damaged so that
the state is not A-conscious. In sum, P-consciousness can be consciousness
of, and consciousness of need not be A-consciousness. Later in this
paper I introduce the distinction between creature consciousness and state
consciousness. In those terms, transitivity has to do primarily with
creature consciousness, whereas in the case of P-consciousness and
A-consciousness, it is state consciousness which is basic. See the
discussion at the end of this section.

[A-CONSCIOUSNESS WITHOUT P-CONSCIOUSNESS]
Since the main point of this paper is that these two concepts of
consciousness are easily confused, it will pay us to consider conceptually
possible cases of one without the other. Actual cases will be more
controversial.

First, I will give some examples of A-consciousness without
P-consciousness. If there could be a full-fledged phenomenal zombie, say a
robot computationally identical to a person, but whose silicon brain did
not support P-consciousness, that would do the trick. I think such cases
conceptually possible, but this is very controversial, and I am trying to
avoid controversy. (See Shoemaker, 1975, 1981)

But there is a less controversial kind of case, a very limited sort of
partial zombie. Consider the blindsight patient who "guesses" that there
is an `X' rather than an `O' in his blind field. Taking his word for it, I
am assuming that he has no P-consciousness of the `X'. As I mentioned, I
am following the target reasoning here, but as I will point out later, my
own argument does not depend on this assumption. I am certainly [not]
assuming that lack of A-consciousness guarantees lack of
P-consciousness--that is, I am not assuming that if you don't say it you
haven't got it.

The blindsight patient also has no `X'-representing A-conscious content,
because although the information that there is an `X' affects his "guess",
it is not available as a premise in reasoning (until he has the quite
distinct state of hearing and believing his own guess), or for rational
control of action or speech. Recall Marcel's point that the thirsty
blindsight patient would not reach for a glass of water in the blind field.
So the blindsight patient's perceptual or quasi-perceptual state is
unconscious in the phenomenal [and] access senses ([and] in the
monitoring senses to be mentioned below too).

Now imagine something that may not exist, what we might call
[super-blindsight]. A real blindsight patient can only guess when given
a choice from a small set of alternatives (`X'/`O'; horizontal/vertical,
etc). But suppose--interestingly, apparently contrary to fact--that a
blindsight patient could be trained to prompt himself at will, guessing
what is in the blind field without being told to guess. The
super-blindsighter spontaneously says "Now I know that there is a
horizontal line in my blind field even though I don't actually see it."
Visual information from his blind field simply pops into his thoughts in
the way that solutions to problems we've been worrying about pop into our
thoughts, or in the way some people just know the time or which way is
North without having any perceptual experience of it. The
super-blindsighter himself contrasts what it is like to know visually about
an `X' in his blind field and an `X' in his sighted field. There is
something it is like to experience the latter, but not the former, he says.
It is the difference between [just knowing] and knowing via a visual
experience. Taking his word for it, here is the point: the content that
there is an `X' in his visual field is A-conscious but not P-conscious.
The super-blindsight case is a very limited partial zombie. The,
forthcoming-a argues (on the basis of neuropsychological claims) that
the visual information processing in blindsight includes no processing by
the object recognition system or the spatial attention system, and so is
very different from the processing of normal vision. This point does not
challenge my claim that the super-blindsight case is a very limited partial
zombie. Note that super-blindsight, as I describe it does not require
object recognition or spatial attention. Whatever it is that allows the
blindsight patient to discriminate an `X' from an `O' and a horizontal from
a vertical line will do. I will argue later that the fact that such cases
do not exist, if it is a fact, is important. Humphrey (1992) suggests that
blindsight is mainly a motor phenomenon--the patient is perceptually
influenced by his own motor tendencies.

Of course, the super-blindsighter has a [thought] that there is an x in
his blind field that is [both] A-conscious and P-conscious. but I am not
talking about the thought. Rather, I am talking about the state of his
perceptual system that gives rise to the thought. It is this state that is
A-conscious without being P-conscious. If you are tempted to deny the
existence of these states of the perceptual system, you should think back
to the total zombie just mentioned. Putting aside the issue of the
possibility of this zombie, note that on a computational notion of
cognition, the zombie has [all] the same A-conscious contents that you
have (if he is your computational duplicate). A-consciousness is an
informational notion. The states of the super-blindsighter's perceptual
system are A-conscious for the same reason as the zombie's.

Is there [actually] such a thing as super-blindsight? Humphrey (1992)
describes a monkey (Helen) who despite [near] total loss of the visual
cortex could nonetheless act in a somewhat visually normal way in certain
circumstances, without any "prompting". One reason to doubt that Helen is
a case of super-blindsight is that Helen may be a case of [sight]. There
was some visual cortex left, and the situations in which she showed
unprompted visual discrimination were ones in which there was no control of
where the stimuli engaged her retina. Another possibility mentioned by
Cowie and Stoerig (1992--attributed to an unpublished paper by Humphrey),
is that there were P-conscious sensory events, though perhaps auditory in
nature. Helen appeared to confuse brief tones with visual stimuli. Cowie
and Stoerig propose a number of ways of getting information out of monkeys
that are close to what we get out of blindsighted humans. Weiskrantz
(1992) mentions that a patient GY sometimes knows that there is a stimulus
(though not what it is) without, he says, seeing anything. But GY also
seems to be having some kind of P-conscious sensation. See Cowie and
Stoerig (1992).)

The (apparent) non-existence of super-blindsight is a striking fact, one
that a number of writers have noticed. Indeed, it is the basis for the
target reasoning. After all, what Marcel was in effect pointing out was
that the blindsight patients, in not reaching for a glass of water, are not
super-blindsighters. As I mentioned, Farah (1994) says that blindsight
(and blind perception generally) turns out always to be degraded. In other
words, blindperception is never superblindperception. Actually, my
notion of A-consciousness seems to fit the data better than the conceptual
apparatus she uses. Blindsight isn't always more degraded in any normal
sense than sight. Weiskrantz (1988) notes that his patient DB had better
acuity in some areas of the blind field (in some circumstances) than in his
sighted field. It would be better to understand her "degraded" in terms of
lack of access.

Notice that the super-blindsighter I have described is just a little bit
different (though in a crucial way) from the ordinary blindsight patient.
In particular, I am [not relying] on what might be thought of as a
full-fledged [quasi-zombie], a super-[duper]-blindsighter whose
blindsight is [every bit] as good, functionally speaking, as his sight.
In the case of the super-duper blindsighter, the [only] difference
between vision in the blind and sighted fields, functionally speaking, is
that the quasi-zombie himself regards them differently. Such an example
will be regarded by some (though not me) as incoherent--see Dennett, 1991,
for example. But we can avoid disagreement about the
super-duper-blindsighter by illustrating the idea of A-consciousness
without P-consciousness by appealing only to the super-blindsighter.
Functionalists may want to know why the super-blindsight case counts as
A-conscious without P-consciousness. After all, they may say, if we have
[really high quality access] in mind, the super-blindsighter that I have
described does not have it, so he lacks [both] P-consciousness and really
high quality A-consciousness. The super-duper-blindsighter, on the other
hand, [has] both, according to the functionalist, so in neither case, the
objection goes, is there A-consciousness without P-consciousness. But the
disagreement about the super-duper-blindsighter is irrelevant to the issue
about the super-blindsighter, and the issue about the super-blindsighter is
merely verbal. I have chosen a notion of A-consciousness whose standards
are lower in part to avoid conflict with the functionalist. I believe in
the possibility of a quasi-zombie like the super-duper-blindsighter, but
the point I am making here does not depend on it. There is no reason to
frame notions so as to muddy the waters with unnecessary conflicts when the
point I am making in this paper is one that functionalists can have some
agreement with. One could put the point by distinguishing three types of
access: (1) really high quality access, (2) medium access and (3) poor
access. The [actual] blindsight patient has poor access, the
super-blindsight patient has medium access and the super-duper blindsight
patient--as well as most of us--has really high quality access. The
functionalist identifies P-consciousness with A-consciousness of the really
high quality kind. I am [defining] `A-consciousness'--and of course, it
is only one of many possible definitions--in terms of medium access, both
to avoid unnecessary conflict with the functionalist, and also so as to
reveal the fallacy of the target reasoning. I choose medium instead of
really high quality access for the former purpose, and I choose medium
instead of poor access for the latter purpose. Though functionalists
should agree with me that there can be A-consciousness without
P-consciousness, some functionalists will see the significance of such
cases very differently from the way I see them. Some functionalists will
see the distinction between A-consciousness and P-consciousness as
primarily a difference in degree rather than a difference in kind, as is
suggested by the contrast between really high quality access and medium
access. So all that A-consciousness without P-consciousness illustrates,
on this functionalist view, is some access without more access. Other
functionalists will stress [kind] of information processing rather than
amount of it. The thought behind this approach is that there is no reason
to think that the P-consciousness of animals whose capacities for
reasoning, reporting and rational guidance of action are more limited than
ours thereby have anything less in the way of P-consciousness. The
functionalist can concede that this thought is correct, and thereby treat
the difference between A-consciousness and P-consciousness as a difference
of kind, albeit kind of information processing.

I don't know whether there are any actual cases of A-consciousness without
P-consciousness, but I hope that I have illustrated their conceptual
possibility.

[P-CONSCIOUSNESS WITHOUT A-CONSCIOUSNESS]
Consider an animal that you are happy to think of as having P-consciousness
for which brain damage has destroyed centers of reasoning and rational
control of action, thus preventing A-consciousness. It certainly seems
[conceptually possible] that the neural bases of P-consciousness systems
and A-consciousness systems be distinct, and if they are distinct, then it
is possible, at least conceptually possible, for one to be damaged while
the other is working well. Evidence has been accumulating for twenty-five
years that the primate visual system has distinct dorsal and ventral
subsystems. Though there is much disagreement about the specializations of
the two systems, it does appear that much of the information in the ventral
system is much more closely connected to P-consciousness than information
in the dorsal system (Goodale and Milner, 1992). So it may actually be
possible to damage A-consciousness without P-consciousness and
conversely. Thus, there is a conflict between this physiological claim
and the Schacter model which dictates that destroying the P-consciousness
module will prevent A-consciousness.

Further, one might suppose (Rey, 1983, 1988; White, 1987) that some of our
own subsystems--say each of the two hemispheres of the brain--might
themselves be separately P-conscious. Some of these subsystems might also
be A-consciousness, but other subsystems might not have sufficient
machinery for reasoning or reporting or rational control of action to allow
their P-conscious states to be A-conscious; so if those states are not
accessible to another system that does have adequate machinery, they will
be P-conscious but not A-conscious.

Here is another reason to believe in P-consciousness without
A-consciousness: Suppose that you are engaged in intense conversation when
suddenly at noon you realize that right outside your window, there is--and
has been for some time--a deafening pneumatic drill digging up the street.
You were aware of the noise all along, but only at noon are you
[consciously aware] of it. That is, you were P-conscious of the noise
all along, but at noon you are both P-conscious [and] A-conscious of it.
Of course, there is a very similar string of events in which the crucial
event at noon is a bit more intellectual. In this alternative scenario, at
noon you realize not just that there is and has been a noise, but also that
[you are now and have been experiencing] the noise. In this alternative
scenario, you get "higher order thought" as well as A-consciousness at
noon. So on the first scenario, the belief that is acquired at noon is
that there is and has been a noise, and on the second scenario, the beliefs
that are acquired at noon are the first one plus the belief that you are
and have been experiencing the noise. But it is the first scenario, not
the second that interests me, for it is a pure case of P-consciousness
without A-consciousness. Note that this case involves a natural use of
`conscious' and `aware' for A-consciousness and P-consciousness,
respectively. `Conscious' and `aware' are more or less synonomous, so
calling the initial P-consciousness `awareness' makes it natural to call
the later P-consciousness plus A-consciousness `conscious awareness'. Of
course I rely here on introspection, but when it comes to P-consciousness,
introspection is an important source of insight. (There is a misleading
aspect to this example--namely that to the extent that `conscious' and
`aware' differ in ordinary talk, the difference goes in the opposite
direction.) This case of P-consciousness without A-consciousness exploits
what William James (1890) called "secondary consciousness", a category that
he meant to include cases of P-consciousness without attention. Of
course, even those who don't belief in P-consciousness at all, as distinct
from A-consciousness, can accept the distinction between a noise that is
A-conscious and a noise that is not A-conscious. There is a more familiar
situation which illustrates the same points. Think back to all those times
when you have been sitting in the kitchen when suddenly the compressor in
the refrigerator goes off. Again, one might naturally say that one was
aware of the noise, but only at the moment in which it went off was one
consciously aware of it. I didn't use this example because I am not sure
that one really has P-consciousness of the noise of the compressor all
along; habituation would perhaps prevent it. Perhaps what happens at the
moment it goes off is that one is P-conscious of the change only.

I have found that the argument of the last paragraph makes those who are
distrustful of introspection uncomfortable. I agree that introspection is
not the last word, but it is the first word, when it comes to
P-consciousness. The example shows the conceptual distinctness of
P-consciousness from A-consciousness and it also puts the burden of proof
on anyone who would argue that as a matter of empirical fact they come to
the same thing.

The difference between different concepts of consciousness gives rise to
different types of [zombie]. We have already encountered the phenomenal
zombies that appear in science-fiction and philosophers' examples--the
familiar computers and robots that think but don't feel. Their states are
A-conscious, but not P-conscious. However, our culture also acknowledges
the concept of voodoo zombies and zombies in [Night of the Living Dead].
If we find that voodoo zombies are cognitively or affectively diminished,
say without will, rather than phenomenally diminished, we would not decide
that they were not zombies after all. And on seeing the next installment
in the "Living Dead" series, we would not feel that our concept of a zombie
had been toyed with if it turned out that there is something it is like for
these zombies to eat their relatives. (They say "Yumm!") No doubt we have
no very well formed zombie-concept, but the considerations just mentioned
motivate the view that a zombie is something that is mentally dead in one
respect or another, and the different respects give rise to different
zombies.

Kathleen Akins (1993) has argued against the distinction between a
phenomenal and a representational aspect of experience. She asks the
reader to look around his or her office, noting what it is like to have
that experience. Then she challenges the reader to imagine that "a bat's
consciousness is just like that--the feel of the scene is exactly the
same--except, of course, all those visual sensations mean something quite
different to the bat. They represent quite different properties. Imagine
that!" She goes on to say "The problem is that you cannot imagine that, no
matter how hard you try" (267). Of course, she is right that you cannot
imagine that. But the explanation of this fact is not that there is no
distinction between the P-conscious and representational aspects of
experience. The explanation is that, as I said earlier, many
representational differences themselves [make] a P-conscious difference.
To repeat the example given earlier, what it is like to hear a sound as
coming from the left is different from what it is like to hear a sound as
coming from the right. Or suppose that you are taken to what appears to be
a town from the Old West; then you are told that it is a backdrop for a
film and that what appear to be buildings are mere fronts. This
representational difference can make a difference in what the buildings
look like to you. A visual experience as of a facade differs from a visual
experience as of a building, even if the retinal image is the same. Or
consider the difference in what it is like to hear sounds in French before
and after you have learned the language (McCullough, 1993).

I am now just about finished justifying and explaining the difference
between P-consciousness and A-consciousness. However, there is one
objection I feel I should comment on. The contrast between P-consciousness
and A-consciousness was in part based on the distinction between
representational and phenomenal content. Put crudely, I said, the
difference was that P-conscious content is phenomenal whereas A-conscious
content is representational. I said this was crude because many phenomenal
contents are also representational. Some will object that phenomenal
content just [is] a kind of representational content. (Dretske, 1994 and
Tye, forthcoming-a,b take this line; Shoemaker, 1994 has a more moderate
version.) The representational/phenomenal distinction is discussed in
Jackson, 1977, Shoemaker, 1981, and Peacocke, 1983.) My reply is first
that phenomenal content need not be representational at all (my favorite
example is the phenomenal content of orgasm). Second, suppose I have an
auditory experience as of something overhead, and simultaneously have a
visual experience as of something overhead. I'm imagining a case where one
has an impression only of where the thing is without an impression of other
features. For example, in the case of the visual experience, one catches a
glimpse of something overhead without any impression of a specific shape or
color. (So the difference cannot be ascribed to further representational
differences.) The phenomenal contents of both experiences represent
something as being overhead, but there is no common phenomenal quality of
the experiences in virtue of which they have this representational
commonality. Note that the point is [not] just that there is a
representational overlap without a corresponding phenomenal overlap (as is
said, for example, in Pendlebury, 1992). That would be compatible with the
following story (offered to me by Michael Tye): phenomenal content is just
one kind of representational content, but these experiences overlap in
non-phenomenal representational content. The point, rather is that there
is a modal difference that isn't at all a matter of representation, but
rather is a matter of how those modes of representation feel. The look and
the sound are both [as of something overhead], but the two phenomenal
contents represent this via different phenomenal qualities. (There is a
line of thought about the phenomenal representational distinction that
involves versions of the traditional "inverted spectrum" hypothesis. See
Shoemaker, 1981b, 1993; Block 1990a.)

In the next section, I will examine some conflations of P-consciousness and
A-consciousness, and in the last section of the paper, I will argue that
the target reasoning is fallacious because of such a conflation. In the
remainder of this section, however, I will briefly discuss two cognitive
notions of consciousness, so that they are firmly distinguished from both
P-consciousness and A-consciousness.

SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS. By this term, I mean the possession of
the concept of the self and the ability to use this concept in thinking
about oneself. A number of higher primates show signs of recognizing that
they see themselves in mirrors. They display interest in correspondences
between their own actions and the movements of their mirror images. By
contrast, monkeys treat their mirror images as strangers at first, slowly
habituating. And the same for dogs. In one experimental paradigm,
experimenters painted colored spots on the foreheads and ears of
anesthetized primates, watching what happened. Chimps between ages 7 and
15 usually try to wipe the spot off (Povinelli, 1994; Gallup, 1982).
Monkeys do not do this. Human babies don't show similar behavior until the
last half of their second year. Perhaps this is a test for
self-consciousness. (Or perhaps it is only a test for understanding
mirrors; but what is involved in understanding mirrors if not that it is
oneself one is seeing?) But even if monkeys and dogs have no
self-consciousness, no one should deny that they have P-conscious pains, or
that there is something it is like for them to see their reflections in the
mirror. P-conscious states often seem to have a "me-ishness" about them,
the phenomenal content often represents the state as a state of me. But
this fact does not at all suggest that we can reduce P-consciousness to
self-consciousness, since such "me-ishness" is the same in states whose
P-conscious content is different. For example, the experience as of red is
the same as the experience as of green in self-orientation, but the two
states are different in phenomenal feel. See White (1987) for an
account of why self-consciousness should be firmly distinguished from
P-consciousness, and why self-consciousness is more relevant to certain
issues of value.

MONITORING-CONSCIOUSNESS. The idea of consciousness as some
sort of internal monitoring takes many forms. One notion is that of some
sort of inner perception. This could be a form of P-consciousness, namely
P-consciousness of one's own states or of the self. Another notion is
often put in information-processing terms: internal scanning. And a third,
metacognitive notion, is that of higher order thought: a conscious state in
this sense is a state accompanied by a thought to the effect that one is in
that state. The thought must be arrived at non-observationally and
non-inferentially. Otherwise, as Rosenthal points out, the higher order
thought definition would get the wrong result for the case in which I come
to know about my anger by inferring it from my own behavior. The
pioneer of these ideas in the philosophical literature is David Armstrong
(1968, 1980). William Lycan (1987) has energetically pursued
self-scanning, and David Rosenthal (1986, 1993), Peter Carruthers (1989,
1992) and Norton Nelkin (1993) have championed higher order thought. See
also Natsoulas (1993) Lormand (forthcoming) makes some powerful criticisms
of Rosenthal. Given my liberal terminological policy, I have no objection
to any of these notions as notions of consciousness. Where I balk is at
attempts to identify P-consciousness with any of these cognitive notions.

To identify P-consciousness with internal scanning is just to grease the
slide to eliminativism about P-consciousness. Indeed, as Georges Rey
(1983) has pointed out, ordinary laptop computers are capable of various
types of self-scanning, but as he also points out, no one would think of
their laptop computer as "conscious" (using the term in the ordinary way,
without making any of the distinctions I've introduced). Since, according
to Rey, internal scanning is essential to consciousness, he concludes that
the concept of consciousness is incoherent. The trouble here is the
failure to make distinctions of the sort I've been making. Even if the
laptop has "internal scanning consciousness", it nonetheless lacks
P-consciousness. To be fair to Rey, his argument is more like a
dilemma: for any supposed feature of consciousness, either a laptop of the
sort we have today has it or else you can't be sure you have it yourself.
So in the case of P-consciousness, the focus might be on the latter
disjunct.

The concepts of consciousness which this paper is mainly about
(P-consciousness and A-consciousness) differ in their logics from the
consciousnesses just mentioned, self-consciousness and monitoring
consciousness. A distinction is often made between the sense of
`conscious' in which a person or other creature is conscious and the sense
in which a state of mind is a conscious state. What it is for there to be
something it is like to be me, that is for me to be P-conscious, is for me
to have one or more states that are P-conscious. If a person is in a
dreamless sleep, and then has a P-conscious pain, he is to that extent
P-conscious. For P-consciousness, it is states that are primary. Likewise
for A-consciousness. If a state has the three properties mentioned earlier
(inferential promiscuity, etc.) it is A-conscious, and a person is
A-conscious just in case the person has an A-conscious state. In the case
of self-consciousness and reflective consciousness, however, creature
consciousness is basic. What it is for a pain to be reflectively conscious
is, e.g. for the person whose pain it is to have another state that is
about that pain. And it is creatures who can think about themselves. It
is not even clear what a self-conscious state would [be].

Perhaps you are wondering why I am being so terminologically liberal,
counting P-consciousness, A-consciousness, monitoring consciousness and
self-consciousness all as types of consciousness. Oddly, I find that many
critics wonder why I would count [phenomenal] consciousness as
consciousness, whereas many others wonder why I would count [access] or
[monitoring] or [self] consciousness as consciousness. In fact two
reviewers of this paper complained about my terminological liberalism, but
for incompatible reasons. One reviewer said: "While what he uses
["P-consciousness"] to refer to--the "what it is like" aspect of
mentality--seems to me interesting and important, I suspect that the
discussion of it under the heading "consciousness" is a source of
confusion...he is right to distinguish access-consciousness (which is what
I think deserves the name "consciousness") from this." Another reviewer
said: "I really still can't see why access is
called...access-consciousness? Why isn't access just...a purely
information processing (functionalist) analysis?" This is not a merely
verbal disagreement. In my view, all of us,
despite our explicit verbal preferences, have some tendency to use
`conscious' and related words in both ways, and our failure to see this
causes a good deal of difficulty in thinking about "consciousness". This
point will be illustrated below.

I've been talking about different concepts of "consciousness" and I've also
said that [the] concept of consciousness is a mongrel concept. Perhaps,
you are thinking, I should make up my mind. My view is that
`consciousness' is actually an ambiguous word, though the ambiguity I have
in mind is not one that I've found in any dictionary. I started the paper
with an analogy between `consciousness' and `velocity', and I think there
is an important similarity. One important difference, however, is that in
the case of `velocity', it is easy to get rid of the temptation to conflate
the two senses, even though for many purposes the distinction is not very
useful. With `consciousness', there is a tendency towards "now you see it,
now you don't." I think the main reason for this is that P-consciousness
presents itself to us in a way that makes it hard to imagine how a
conscious state could fail to be accessible and self-reflective, so it is
easy to fall into habits of thought that do not distinguish these concepts.

The chief alternative to the ambiguity hypothesis is that there is a single
concept of consciousness that is a [cluster concept.] For example, a
prototypical religion involves belief in supernatural beings, sacred and
profane objects, rituals, a moral code, religious feelings, prayer, a world
view, an organization of life based on the world view and a social group
bound together by the previous items (Alston, 1967). But for all of these
items, there are actual or possible religions that lack them. For example,
some forms of Buddhism do not involve belief in a supreme being and Quakers
have no sacred objects. It is convenient for us to use a concept of
religion that binds together a number of disparate concepts whose referents
are often found together.

The distinction between ambiguity and cluster concept can be drawn in a
number of equally legitimate ways that classify some cases differently.
That is, there is some indeterminacy in the distinction. Some might even
say that [velocity] is a cluster concept because for many purposes it is
convenient to group average and instantaneous velocity together. I favor
drawing the distinction this way: when there are some occasions of literal
use of a word to clearly and determinately express one element of "the
cluster", we have ambiguity. When one catches a glimpse of a car flashing
by so quickly that it is a blur, calling it `fast' is plausibly calling it
high in instantaneous velocity, since there seems no implicit
relativization to a trip with a high average velocity. A similarly pure
use in the case of `consciousness' is provided by the science fiction
example I've mentioned of the robot that is computationally like us even
though it lacks consciousness. What it is supposed to lack is
[P-consciousness].

When I called [consciousness] a mongrel concept I was not declaring
allegiance to the cluster theory. Rather, what I had in mind was that an
ambiguous word often corresponds to an ambiguous mental representation, one
that functions in thought as a unitary entity and thereby misleads. These
are mongrels. I would also describe [velocity] and [degree of heat]
(as used by the Florentine Experimenters of the 17th Century) as mongrel
concepts. This is the grain of truth in the cluster-concept theory.

CONFLATIONs

Conflation of P-consciousness and A-consciousness is ubiquitous in the
burgeoning literature on consciousness, especially in the literature on
syndromes like blindsight. Nearly every article I read on the subject by
philosophers and psychologists involves some confusion. For example, Baars
(1988) makes it abundantly clear that he is talking about P-consciousness.
"What is a theory of consciousness a theory of? In the first instance...it
is a theory of the nature of experience. The reader's private experience
of [this] word, his or her mental image of yesterday's breakfast, or the
feeling of a toothache--these are all contents of consciousness." (14) Yet
his theory is a "global workspace" model of A-consciousness. Shallice
(1988a,b) says he is giving an account of "phenomenal experience", but
actually gives an information processing theory of A-consciousness. (His
1988b is about an "information-processing model of consciousness".)
Mandler (1985) describes consciousness in P-conscious terms like
"phenomenal" and "experience" but gives a totally cognitive account
appropriate to A-consciousness. Edelman's (1989) theory is also intended
to explain P-consciousness, but it seems a theory of access-consciousness
and self-consciousness; see Chalmers (1993). Kosslyn and Koenig (1992) say
"We will address here the everyday sense of the term ["consciousness"]; it
refers to the phenomenology of experience, the feeling of red and so
forth." (431-433 I am indebted to Michael Tye for calling this quotation to
my attention.) But then they give a "parity check" theory that seems more
of a theory of monitoring consciousness or A-consciousness.

One result of conflating P-consciousness with other consciousnesses is a
tendency to regard ideas as plausible that should be seen as way out on a
limb. For example, Johnson-Laird (1988, p. 360-361) talks of
consciousness, using terms like "subjective experience". He goes on to
hypothesize that consciousness is a matter of building models of the self
and models of the self building models of itself, and so on. This
hypothesis has two strikes against it, as should be obvious if one is clear
about the distinction between P-consciousness and self-consciousness. Dogs
and babies may not build such complex models, but the burden of proof is
surely on anyone who doubts that they have P-consciousness.

Another example: In a discussion of phenomena of implicit perception,
Kihlstrom, et.al. (1992) make it clear that the phenomena concern
P-consciousness: "In the final analysis, consciousness is a phenomenal
quality that may accompany perception..." (42). But they claim that
self-consciousness is precisely what is lacking in implicit perception:
"This connection to the self is just what appears to be lacking in the
phenomena of implicit perception...When contact occurs between the
representation of the event--what might be called the "fact node" and the
representation of oneself--what might be called the "self node," the event
comes into consciousness." (p. 42). But again, as we go down the
phylogenetic scale we may well encounter creatures that are P-conscious but
have no "self-node", and the same may be true of the very young of our own
species. What should be announced as a theory that conflicts with common
sense, that P-consciousness arises from representing the self, can appear
innocuous if one is not careful to make the distinctions among the
consciousnesses.

Andrade (1993) makes it clear that the concern is P-consciousness. For
example, "Without consciousness, there is no pain. There may be tissue
damage, and physiological responses to tissue damage, but there will not be
the phenomenological experience of pain" (13). Considering work on control
by a central executive system, Andrade (correctly, I think) takes the
dominant theories to "identify" consciousness with central executive
control. "Current psychological theories identify consciousness with
systems that coordinate lower-level information processing". But there are
two very different paths to such an identification: (1) conflating
P-consciousness with A-consciousness and theorizing about A-consciousness
in terms of the systems Andrade mentions, (2) clearly distinguishing
P-consciousness from A-consciousness and hypothesizing that the mechanisms
that underly the latter give rise to the former. I doubt that any
objective reader of this literature will think that the hypothesis of path
2 is often very likely.

In the writings of some psychologists, assimilation of P-consciousness to
A-consciousness is a product of the (admirable) desire to be able to
[measure] P-consciousness. Jacoby, et. al., 1992 assimilate
P-consciousness to A-consciousness for that reason. Their subject matter
is perception without "subjective experience", in normal perceivers in
conditions of divided attention or degraded presentations. In other words,
perception without P-consciousness, what is often known as subliminal
perception. They note that it is very difficult to disentangle conscious
perception from unconscious perception because no one has conceived of an
experimental paradigm that isolates one of these modes. "We avoid this
problem," they say, "by inferring awareness ["subjective experience"--N.B]
from conscious control and defining unconscious influences as effects that
cannot be controlled." (108) The effect of this procedure is to
definitionally disallow phenomenal events that have no effect on later
mental processes and to to definitionally type phenomenal events by appeal
to judgements made on the basis of them. "Subjective experience", they
say, "results from an attribution process in which mental events are
interpreted in the context of current circumstances." (112) I am reminded
of an article in the sociology of science that I once read that defined the
quality of a scientific paper as the number of references to it in the
literature. Operational definitions do no good if the result is measuring
something [else].

Schacter (1989) is explicit about what he means by `consciousness' (which,
he often calls `conscious awareness'), namely P-consciousness. He mentions
that the sense he has in mind is that of "phenomenal awareness"...`the
running span of subjective experience'" (quoting Dimond, 1976), and
consciousness in his sense is repeatedly contrasted with information
processing notions. Nonetheless, in an effort to associate the "Conscious
Awareness System" (what I call the phenomenal consciousness system in my
labeling of his model in Figure 1) with the inferior parietal lobes, he
says that lesions in this area

have also been associated with confusional states, which are
characterized by disordered thought, severe disorientation, and a breakdown
of selective attention--in short, a global disorder of conscious
awareness...Several lines of evidence indicate that lesions to certain
regions of the parietal lobes can produce disorders of conscious awareness.
First, global confusional states have been reported in right parietal
patients...Second, the syndrome of anosognosia--unawareness and denial of a
neuropsychological deficit--is often associated with parietal
damage...Anosognosic patients...may be unaware of motor
deficits...perceptual deficits...and complete unawareness can be observed
even when the primary deficit is severe...(1988, p. 371)
Here, Schacter reverts to a use of `consciousness' and `awareness' in a
variety of cognitive senses. Disordered thought, disorientation and a
breakdown of selective attention are not primarily disorders of
P-consciousness. Further, anosognosia is primarily a defect in
A-consciousness, not P-consciousness. Anosognosia is a neurological
syndrome that involves an inability to acknowledge or have access to
information about another neurological syndrome. A patient might have
anosognosia for, say his prosopagnosia while complaining incessantly about
another deficit. Young (1994a) describes a woman who was a painter before
becoming prosopagnosic. Looking at portraits she had painted, trying to
figure out whom they represented, she laboriously figured out whom each
painting was of, reasoning out loud about the person's apparent age, sex,
and any significant objects in the picture, plus her verbal memories of the
portraits that she had painted. When the experimenter commented on her
prosopagnosia, she said that she "had recognized them," and did not think
that there was anything odd about her laborious
reasoning. Interestingly, she was in many respects much worse at many
face-perception tasks than LH (the prosopagnosic mentioned earlier)--she
couldn't match photographs of faces, for example. I have noticed that
people who know little about anosognosia tend to favor various debunking
hypotheses. That is, they assume that the experimenters have made one or
another silly mistake in describing the syndrome, because, after all, how
could anyone fail to notice that they can't recognize faces, or worse, that
they are blind. See Young, et. al., 1993, for a good debunking of the
debunking hypotheses.

The crucial feature of anosognosia about prosopagnosia is that the
patient's access to information about her own inability to recognize faces
is in some way blocked. She cannot report this inability or reason about
it or use information about it to control her action. There may also be
some defect of P-consciousness. Perhaps everyone looks familiar or more
likely, perhaps patients with prosopagnosia no longer have the ability to
have visual feelings of familiarity for faces that are distinct from
feelings of unfamiliarity. But this is not crucial to the syndrome, as is
shown by the fact that we confidently ascribe anosognosia on the basis of
the patient's cognitive state--the lack of knowledge of the
deficit--without knowing what defects of P-consciousness may or may not be
involved. Further, the same defects of P-consciousness could be present in
a [non-anosognosic] prosopagnosic without discrediting the patient's
status as non-anosognosic. One can imagine such a person saying "Gosh, I
don't recognize anyone--in fact, I no longer have a visual sense of the
difference between familiar and unfamiliar faces." This would be
prosopagnosia [without] anosognosia. To take anosognosia as primarily a
defect of P-consciousness is a mistake.

I don't think these conflations cause any real problem in Schacter's
theorizing, but as a general rule, if you want to get anywhere in
theorizing about X you should have a good pre-theoretical grip on the
difference between X and things that are easily confused with it.

Daniel Dennett (1986, 1991) provides another example of conflation of a
number of concepts of consciousness. (See my 1993.) I will focus on
Dennett's claim that consciousness is a cultural construction. He
theorizes that "human consciousness (1) is too recent an innovation to be
hard-wired into the innate machinery, (2) is largely the product of
cultural evolution that gets imparted to brains in early training" (1991,
p. 219). Sometimes he puts the point in terms of memes, which are ideas
such as the idea of the wheel or the calendar. Memes are the smallest
cultural units that replicate themselves reliably, viz., cultural analogs
of genes. In these terms then, Dennett's claim is that "human
consciousness is [itself] a huge complex of memes". (1991, p.210) This
view is connected with Dennett's idea that you can't have consciousness
without having the concept of consciousness. He says consciousness is like
love and money in this regard, though in the case of money, what is
required for one to have money is that [someone] have the concept of
money (1991,p.24;1986, p. 152).

I think the reason Dennett says "largely" the product of cultural evolution
is that he thinks of consciousness as the software that operates on
genetically determined hardware that is the product of biological
evolution. Though consciousness requires the concept of consciousness,
with consciousness as with love, there is a biological basis without which
the software could not run.

Now I hope it is obvious that P-consciousness is not a cultural
construction. Remember, we are talking about P-consciousness itself, not
the concept of P-consciousness. The idea would be that there was a time at
which people genetically like us ate, drank and had sex, but there was
nothing it was like for them to do these things. Further, each of us would
have been like that if not for specific concepts we acquired from our
culture in growing up. Ridiculous! Of course, culture [affects]
P-consciousness; the wondrous experience of drinking a great wine takes
training to develop. But culture affects feet too; people who have spent
their lives going barefoot in the Himalayas have feet that differ from
those of people who have worn tight shoes 18 hours a day. We mustn't
confuse the idea that culture [influences] consciousness with the idea
that it (largely) creates it.

What about A-consciousness? Could there have been a time when humans who
are biologically the same as us never had the contents of their perceptions
and thoughts poised for free use in reasoning or in rational control of
action? Is this ability one that culture imparts to us as children? Could
it be that until we acquired the concept of [poised for free use in
reasoning or in rational control of action], none of our perceptual
contents were A-conscious? Again, there is no reason to take such an idea
seriously. Very much lower animals are A-conscious, presumably without any
such concept.

A-consciousness is as close as we get to the official view of consciousness
in [Consciousness Explained] and in later writings, e.g. Dennett (1993).
The official theory of Dennett (1991) is the Multiple Drafts Theory, the
view that there are distinct parallel tracks of representation that vie for
access to reasoning, verbalization and behavior. This seems a theory of
A-consciousness. Dennett (1993) says "Consciousness is cerebral
celebrity--nothing more and nothing less. Those contents are conscious
that persevere, that monopolize resources long enough to achieve certain
typical and "symptomatic" effects--on memory, on the control of behavior,
and so forth." (929) Could it be anything other than a biological fact
about humans that some brain representations persevere enough to affect
memory, control behavior, etc? So on the closest thing to Dennett's
official kind of consciousness, the thesis (that consciousness is a
cultural construction) is no serious proposal.

What about monitoring consciousness? No doubt there was a time when people
were less introspective than some of us are now. But is there any evidence
that there was a time when people genetically like us had no capacity to
think or express the thought that one's leg hurts. To be able to think
this thought involves being able to think that one's leg hurts, and that is
a higher order thought of the sort that is a plausible candidate for
monitoring consciousness (Rosenthal, 1986). Here for the first time we do
enter the realm of actual empirical questions, but without some very
powerful evidence for such a view, there is no reason to give it any
credence. Dennett gives us not the slightest hint of the kind of weird
evidence that we would need to begin to take this claim seriously, and so
it would be a disservice to so interpret him.

What about self-consciousness? I mentioned Gallup's and Povinelli's "mark
test" evidence (the chimp tries to wipe off a mark on its face seen in a
mirror) that chimps are self-conscious. An experiment in this vein that
Dennett actually mentions (p. 428), and mentions positively, is that a
chimp can learn to get bananas via a hole in its cage by watching its arm
on a closed circuit TV whose camera is some distance away (Menzel, et.al,
1985). The literature on the topic of animal self-consciousness is full of
controversy. See Heyes, 1993, Mitchell, 1993a, 1993b;Gallup and Povinelli
1993;de Lannoy, 1993; Anderson, 1993; Byrne, 1993. I have no space to do
justice to the issues, so I will have to make do with just stating my view:
I think the weight of evidence in favor of minimal self-consciousness on
the part of chimps is overwhelming. By minimal self-consciousness I mean
the ability to think about oneself in some way or other--that is, no
particular way is required. Many of the criticisms of the mark test
actually presuppose that the chimp is self-conscious in this minimal sense.
For example, it is often suggested that chimps that pass the mark test
think that they are seeing another chimp (e.g. Heyes, 1993), and since the
chimp in the mirror has a mark on its forehead, the chimp who is looking
wonders whether he or she does too. But in order for me to wonder whether
[I] have a mark on my forehead, I have to be able to think about myself.
In any case, Dennett does not get into these issues (except, as mentioned,
to favor chimp self-consciousness), so it does not appear that he has this
interpretation in mind.

So far, on all the consciousness I have mentioned, Dennett's thesis turns
out to be false. But there is a trend: Of the concepts I considered, the
first two made the thesis silly, even of animals. In the case of
monitoring consciousness, there is a real empirical issue in the case of
many types of mammals, and so it isn't completely silly to wonder about
whether people have it. Only in the last case, self-consciousness, is
there a serious issue about whether chimps are conscious, and that suggests
that we might get a notion of self-consciousness that requires some
cultural elements. In recent years, the idea of the self as a federation
of somewhat autonomous agencies has become popular, and for good reason.
Nagel (1971) made a good case on the basis of split-brain data, and
Gazzaniga and LeDoux (1978) and Gazzaniga (1985) have added additional
considerations that have some plausibilty. And Dennett has a chapter about
the self at the end of the book that gives similar arguments. Maybe what
Dennett is saying is that non-federal-self consciousness, the ability to
think of oneself as not being such a federation (or more simply,
federal-self consciousness) is a cultural construction.

But now we have moved from falsity to banality. I'm not saying that the
proposal that we are federations is banal. What is banal is that the
having and applying a sophisticated concept such as being a federation (or
not being a federation) requires a cultural construction. Compare
chairman-self consciousness, the ability to think of oneself as chairman,
as the one who guides the Department, the one who has the keys, etc. It is
a banality that a cultural construction is required in order for a person
to think of himself in that way, and the corresponding point about
federal-self consciousness is similarly banal.

The great oddity of Dennett's discussion is that throughout he gives the
impression that his theory is [about P-consciousness], though he concedes
that what he says about it conflicts with our normal way of thinking about
consciousness. This comes out especially strongly in an extended
discussion of Julian Jaynes' (1976) book which he credits with a version of
the view I am discussing, viz. that consciousness is a cultural
construction which requires its own concept. He says:

Perhaps this is an autobiographical confession: I am rather fond of his
[Jaynes'] way of using these terms; [`consciousness', `mind' and other
mental terms] I rather like his way of carving up consciousness. It is in
fact very similar to the way that I independently decided to carve up
consciousness some years ago.

So what then is the project? The project is, in one sense, very simple and
very familiar. It is bridging what he calls the "awesome chasm" between
mere inert matter and the inwardness, as he puts it, of a conscious being.
Consider the awesome chasm between a brick and a bricklayer. There isn't,
in Thomas Nagel's (1974) famous phrase, anything that it is like to be a
brick. But there is something that it is like to be a bricklayer, and we
want to know what the conditions were under which there happened to come to
be entities that it was like something to be in this rather special sense.
That is the story, the developmental, evolutionary, historical story, that
Jaynes sets out to tell. (149)

In sum, Dennett's thesis is trivially false if it is construed to be about
P-consciousness, as advertised. It is also false if taken to be about
A-consciousness which is Dennett's official view of consciousness. But if
taken to be about a highly sophisticated version of self-consciousness, it
is banal. That's what can happen if you talk about consciousness without
making the sorts of distinctions that I am urging.

THE FALLACY OF THE TARGET REASONING
We now come to the denouement of the paper, the application of the
P-consciousness/A-consciousness distinction to the fallacy of the target
reasoning. Let me begin with the Penfield-van Gulick-Searle reasoning.
Searle (1992) adopts Penfield's (1975) claim that during petit mal
seizures, patients are "totally unconscious". Quoting Penfield at length,
Searle describes three patients who, despite being "totally unconscious",
continue walking or driving home or playing the piano, but in a mechanical
way. Van Gulick (1989) gives a briefer treatment, also quoting Penfield.
He says "The importance of conscious experience for the construction and
control of action plans is nicely illustrated by the phenomenon of
automatism associated with some petit mal epileptic seizures. In such
cases, electrical disorder leads to a loss of function in the higher brain
stem...As a result the patient suffers a loss of conscious experience in
the phenomenal sense although he can continue to react selectively to
environmental stimuli." (p. 220) Because van Gulick's treatment is more
equivocal and less detailed, and because Searle also comments on my
accusations of conflating A-consciousness with P-consciousness, I'll focus
on Searle.

Searle says:
...the epileptic seizure rendered the patient [totally unconscious], yet
the patient continued to exhibit what would normally be called
goal-directed behavior...In all these cases, we have complex forms of
apparently
goal-directed behavior without any consciousness. Now why could all
behavior not be like that? Notice that in the cases, the patients were
performing types of actions that were habitual, routine and
memorized...normal, human, conscious behavior has a degree of flexibility
and creativity that is absent from the Penfield cases of the unconscious
driver and the unconscious pianist. [Consciousness adds powers of
discrimination and flexibility] even to memorized routine activities...one
of the evolutionary advantages conferred on us by consciousness is the much
greater [flexibility,
sensitivity, and creativity] we derive from being conscious. (1992,
p.108-109, italics mine)
Searle's reasoning is that consciousness is missing, and with it,
flexibility, sensitivity and creativity, so this is an indication that a
function of consciousness is to add these qualities. Now it is completely
clear that the concept of consciousness invoked by both Searle and van
Gulick is P-consciousness. Van Gulick speaks of "conscious experience in
the phenomenal sense," and Searle criticizes me for supposing that there is
a legitimate use of `conscious' to mean A-conscious: "Some philosophers
(e.g. Block, "Two Concepts of Consciousness") claim that there is a sense
of this word that implies no sentience whatever, a sense in which a total
zombie could be `conscious'. I know of no such sense, but in any case, that
is not the sense in which I am using the word." (1992, p. 84). But
neither Searle nor van Gulick nor Penfield give any reason to believe that
P-consciousness is missing or even diminished in the epileptics they
describe. The piano player, walker and the driver don't cope with new
situations very well, but they do show every sign of [normal sensation].
For example, Searle, quoting Penfield, describes the epileptic walker as
"thread[ing] his way" through the crowd. Doesn't he [see] the obstacles
he avoids? Suppose he gets home by turning right at a red wall. Isn't
there something it is like for him to see the red wall--and isn't it
different from what it is like for him to see a green wall? Searle give no
reason to think the answer is no. Because of the very inflexibility and
lack of creativity of the behavior they exhibit, it is the [thought
processes] of these patients (including A-consciousness) that are most
obviously deficient; no reason at all is given to think that their
P-conscious states lack vivacity or intensity. Of course, I don't claim to
know what it is really like for these epileptics; my point is rather that
for the argument for the function of P-consciousness to have any force, a
case would have to be made that P-consciousness is [actually] missing, or
at least diminished. Searle argues: P-consciousness is missing; so is
creativity; therefore the former lack explains the latter lack. But no
support at all is given for the first premise, and as we shall see, it is
no stretch to suppose that what's gone wrong is that the ordinary mongrel
notion of consciousness is being used; it wraps P-consciousness and
A-consciousness together, and so an obvious function of A-consciousness is
illicitly transferred to P-consciousness.

This difficulty in the reasoning is highlighted if we assume Schacter's
model. In terms of Schacter's model, there is no reason to doubt that the
information from their senses reaches the P-conscious module, but there is
reason to doubt that the Executive system processes this information in the
normal way. So there is reason to blame their inflexibility and lack of
creativity on problems in the Executive system or the linkage between the
P-consciousness module and the Executive system. There is an
additional problem in the reasoning that I won't go into except here.
There is a well-known difficulty in reasoning of the form: X is missing;
the patient has lost the ability to do blah-blah; therefore a function of X
is to facilitate blah-blahing. In a complex system, a loss may reverberate
through the system, triggering a variety of malfunctions that are not
connected in any serious way with the function of the missing item. An
imperfect but memorable example (that I heard from Tom Bever) will
illustrate: the Martians want to find out about the function of various
Earthly items. They begin with The Pentagon, and focus in on a particular
drinking fountain in a hall on the third floor of the North side of the
building. "If we can figure out what that is for", they think, "we can
move on to something more complex." So they vaporize the drinking fountain,
causing noise and spurting pipes. Everyone comes out of their office to
see what happened and the Martians conclude that the function of the
fountain was to keep people in their offices. The application of this
point to the petit mal case is that even if I am right that it is
A-consciousness, not P-consciousness, that is diminished or missing, I
would not jump to the conclusion that A-consciousness has a function of
adding powers of discrimination, flexibility and creativity. Creativity,
for example, may have its sources in the unA-conscious, requiring powers of
reasoning and control of action and reporting only for its expression.

Searle and van Gulick base their arguments on Penfield's claim that a petit
mal seizure "converts the individual into a mindless automaton" (Penfield,
1975, p. 37). Indeed, Penfield repeatedly refers to these patients as
"unconscious", "mindless", and as "automata". But what does Penfield
[mean]? Searle and van Gulick assume that Penfield means P-consciousness,
since they adopt the idea that that is what the term means (though as we
shall see, Searle himself sometimes uses the term to mean A-consciousness).
Attending to Penfield's account, we find the very shifting among different
concepts of consciousness that I have described here, but the dominant
theme by far involves thinking of the patients as cognitively rather than
phenomenally deficient during petit mal seizures. Here is Penfield's
summary of the description of the patients: In an attack of
automatism the patient becomes suddenly unconscious, but, since other
mechanisms in the brain continue to function, he changes into an automaton.
He may wander about, confused and aimless. Or he may continue to carry out
whatever purpose his mind was in the act of handing on to his automatic
sensory-motor mechanism when the highest brain-mechanism went out of
action. Or he follows a stereotyped, habitual pattern of behavior. In
every case, however, the automaton can make few, if any decisions for which
there has been no precedent. [He makes no record of a stream of
consciousness.] Thus, he will have complete amnesia for the period of
epileptic discharge...In general, if new decisions are to be made, the
automaton cannot make them. In such a circumstance, he may become
completely unreasonable and uncontrollable and even dangerous.

In these passages, and throughout the book, the dominant theme in
descriptions of these patients is one of deficits in thinking, planning and
decision making. No mention is made of any sensory or phenomenal
deficit. Indeed, in the italicized passage above (italics mine) there
is an implicit suggestion that perhaps there are P-conscious events of
which no record is made. I could only find one place in the book where
Penfield says anything that might be taken to contradict this
interpretation: "Thus, the automaton can walk through traffic as though he
were aware of all that he hears and sees, and so continue on his way home.
But he is aware of nothing and so makes no memory record. If a policemen
were to accost him he might consider the poor fellow to be walking in his
sleep." (60) But to properly understand this, we need to know what he
means by "awareness", and what he thinks goes on in sleep. Judging by
Penfield's use of synonyms, by "awareness" he means something in the
category of the higher order thought analyses or the self-consciousness
sense. For example, in discussing his peculiar view that ants are
conscious, he seems to use `conscious' and `aware' to mean `self-aware'
(62, 105, 106) Further, he makes it clear that although the mind is shut
off during sleep, the sensory cortex is quite active.

My interpretation is supported by a consideration of Penfield's theoretical
rationale for his claim that petit mal victims are unconscious. He
distinguishes two brain mechanisms, "(a) the [mind's mechanism] (or
highest brain mechanism); and (b) the [computer] (or automatic
sensory-motor mechanism)" (p.40, italics Penfield's). The mind's mechanism
is most prominently mentioned in connection with planning and decision
making, for example, "...the highest brain mechanism is the mind's
executive...". When arguing that there is a soul that is connected to the
mind's mechanism, he mentions only cognitive functions: He asks whether
such a soul is improbable, and answers "It is not so improbable, to my
mind, as is the alternative expectation--that the highest brain mechanism
should itself understand, and reason, and direct voluntary action, and
decide where attention should be turned and what the computer must learn,
and record, and reveal on demand." (82). Penfield's soul is a cognitive
soul.

By contrast, the computer is devoted to [sensory] and motor functions.
Indeed, he emphasizes that the mind only has contact with sensory and motor
areas of the cortex via controlling the computer, which itself has direct
contact with the sensory and motor areas. Since it is the mind's mechanism
that is knocked out in petit mal seizures, the sensory areas are intact in
the "automaton".

Searle (1990b) attempts (though of course he wouldn't accept this
description) to use the idea of degrees of P-consciousness to substitute
for A-consciousness. I will quote a chunk of what he says about this.
(The details of the context don't matter.)

By consciousness I simply mean those subjective states of
awareness or sentience that begin when one wakes in the morning and
continue throughout the period that one one is awake until one falls into a
dreamless sleep, into a coma, or dies or is otherwise, as they say,
unconscious.

I quoted this passage earlier as an example of how a characterization of
consciousness can go wrong by pointing to too many things. Searle means to
be pointing to P-consciousness. But A-consciousness and P-consciousness
normally occur together when one is awake, and both are normally absent in
a coma and a dreamless sleep--so this characterization doesn't distinguish
them.

On my account, dreams are a form of consciousness,...though
they are of less intensity than full blown waking alertness. Consciousness
is an on/off switch: You are either conscious or not. Though once
conscious, the system functions like a rheostat, and there can be an
indefinite range of different degrees of consciousness, ranging from the
drowsiness just before one falls asleep to the full blown complete
alertness of the obsessive.

Degrees of P-consciousness are one thing, obsessive attentiveness is
another--indeed the latter is a notion from the category of
A-consciousness, not P-consciousness.

There are lots of different degrees of consciousness, but door
knobs, bits of chalk, and shingles are not conscious at all...These points,
it seems to me, are misunderstood by Block. He refers to what he calls an
"access sense of consciousness". On my account there is no such sense. I
believe that he...[confuses] what I would call peripheral consciousness or
[inattentiveness] with total unconsciousness. It is true, for example,
that when I am driving my car "on automatic pilot" I am not paying much
attention to the details of the road and the traffic. But it is simply not
true that I am totally unconscious of these phenomena. If I were, there
would be a car crash. We need therefore to make a distinction between the
[center of my attention, the focus of my consciousness] on the one hand,
and the [periphery] on the other...There are lots of phenomena right now
of which I am peripherally conscious, for example the feel of the shirt on
my neck, the touch of the computer keys at my finger tips, and so on. But
as I use the notion, none of these is unconscious in the sense in which the
secretion of enzymes in my stomach is unconscious. (All quotes from
Searle, 1990b, p. 635, italics mine)

The first thing to note is the [contradiction]. Earlier, I quoted Searle
saying that a "totally unconscious" epileptic could nonetheless drive home.
Here, he says that if a driver was totally unconscious, the car would
crash. The sense of `conscious' in which the car would crash if the driver
weren't conscious is A-consciousness, not P-consciousness.
P-consciousness [all by itself] wouldn't keep the car from crashing--the
P-conscious contents have to be put to use in rationally controlling the
car, which is an aspect of A-consciousness. When Searle says the
"totally unconscious" epileptic can nonetheless drive home, he is talking
about P-consciousness; when he says the car would crash if the driver were
totally unconscious, he is talking mainly about
A-consciousness. Notice that it will do no good for Searle to say that in
the quotation of the last paragraph, he is talking about
creature-consciousness rather than state-consciousness. What it is for a
person to be P-unconscious is for his states (all or the relevant ones) to
lack P-consciousness. Creature P-consciousness is parasitic on state
P-consciousness. Also, it will do him no good to appeal to the
conscious/conscious of distinction. (The epilectics were "totally
unconscious", but if he were "unconscious of" the details of the road and
traffic the car would crash.) The epileptics were "totally unconscious"
and therefor, since Searle has no resource of A-consciousness, he must say
that the epilectics were totally unconscious [of] anything. So he is
committed to saying that the epilectic driver can drive despite being
totally unconscious of anything. And that contradicts the claim that I
quoted that if Searle were totally unconscious of the details of the road
and traffic, then the car would crash. If Searle says that someone who is
totally unconscious can nonetheless be conscious of something, that would
be a backhanded way of acknowledging the distinction.

The upshot is that Searle finds himself drawn to using `consciousness' in
the sense of A-consciousness, despite his official position that there is
no such sense. Despite his official ideology, when he attempts to deploy a
notion of degrees of P-consciousness he ends up talking about
A-consciousness--or about both A-consciousness and P-consciousness wrapped
together in the usual mongrel concept. Inattentiveness just [is] lack of
A-consciousness (though it will have effects on P-consciousness). Thus, he
may be right about the inattentive driver (note, the inattentive driver,
not the petit mal case). When the inattentive driver stops at a red light,
presumably there is something it is like for him to see the red light--the
red light no doubt looks red in the usual way, that is it appears as
brightly and vividly to him as red normally does. But since he is thinking
about something else, perhaps he is not using this information very much in
his reasoning nor is he using this information to control his speech or
action in any sophisticated way--that is, perhaps his A-consciousness of
what he sees is diminished. (Of course, it can't be totally gone or the
car would crash.) Alternatively, A-consciousness might be normal, and the
driver's poor memory of the trip may just be due to failure to put contents
that are both P-conscious and A-conscious into memory; my point is that to
the extent that Searle's story is right about [any] kind of
consciousness, it is right about A-consciousness, not P-consciousness.

Searle's talk of the center and the periphery, is in the first instance
about kinds of or degrees of access, not "degrees of phenomenality." You
may recall that in introducing the A/P distinction, I used Searle's example
of attending to the feel of the shirt on the back of one's neck. My point
was that A-consciousness and P-consciousness interact: bringing something
from the periphery to the center can [affect] one's phenomenal state.
The attention makes the experience more fine-grained, more intense (though
a pain that is already intense needn't become more intense when one attends
to it). There is a phenomenal difference between figure and ground, though
the perception of the colors of the ground can be just as intense as those
of the figure, or so it seems to me. Access and phenomenality often
interact, one bringing along the other--but that shouldn't make us blind to
the difference.

Though my complaint is partly verbal, there is more to it. For the end
result of deploying a mongrel concept is wrong reasoning about a function
of P-consciousness.

Let me turn now to a related form of reasoning used by Owen Flanagan, 1992
(142-145). Flanagan discusses Luria's patient Zazetsky, a soldier who lost
the memories of his "middle" past--between childhood and brain injury. The
information about his past is represented in Zazetsky's brain, but it only
comes out via "automatic writing". Flanagan says "The saddest irony is
that although each piece of Zazetsky's autobiography was consciously
reappropriated by him each time he hit upon a veridical memory in writing,
he himself was never able to fully reappropriate, to keep in clear and
continuous view, to live with, the self he reconstructed in the thousand
pages he wrote." Flanagan goes on to blame the difficulty on a defect of
consciousness, and he means P-consciousness: "Zazetsky's conscious
capacities are (partly) maimed. His dysfunction is rooted in certain
defects of consciousness." (144-145) But Zazetsky's root problem appears to
be a difficulty in A-consciousness, though that has an effect on
self-consciousness and P-consciousness. The problem seems to be that the
memories of the middle past are not accessible to him in the manner of his
memories of childhood and recent past. To the extent that he knows about
the middle past, it is as a result of reading his automatic writing, and so
he has the sort of access we have to a story about someone else. The root
difficulty is segregation of information, and whatever P-conscious feelings
of fragmentation he has can be taken to result from the segregation of
information. So there is nothing in this case that suggests a function of
P-consciousness.

Let us now move to the line of thought mentioned at the outset about how
the thirsty blindsight patient doesn't reach for the glass of water in the
blind field. A similar line of reasoning appears in Shevrin, 1992; he
notes that in subliminal perception, we don't fix the source of a mental
content. Subliminal percepts aren't conscious, so consciousness must have
the function of fixing the source of mental contents. (This line of
thought appears in Marcel, 1986,1988, van Gulick, 1989 (though endorsed
equivocally) and Flanagan, 1989.) The reasoning is that (1) consciousness
is missing, (2) information that the patient in some sense possesses is not
used in reasoning or in guiding action or in reporting, so (3) the function
of consciousness must be to somehow allow information from the senses to be
so used in guiding action (Marcel, 1986, 1988). Flanagan (1992) agrees
with Marcel: "Conscious awareness of a water fountain to my right will lead
me to drink from it if I am thirsty. But the thirsty blindsighted person
will make no move towards the fountain unless pressed to do so. The
inference to the best explanation is that conscious awareness of the
environment facilitates semantic comprehension and adaptive motor actions
in creatures like us." And: "Blindsighted patients never initiate activity
toward the blindfield because they lack subjective awareness of things in
that field". (Flanagan, 1992, p 141-142; the same reasoning occurs in his
1991, 349.) Van Gulick, 1989, agrees with Marcel, saying "Subjects never
initiate on their own any actions informed by perceptions from the blind
field. The moral to be drawn from this is that information must normally
be represented in phenomenal consciousness if it is to play any role in
guiding voluntary action." (p. 220)

Bernard Baars argues for eighteen different functions of consciousness on
the same ground. He says that the argument for these functions is "that
loss of consciousness--through habituation, automaticity, distraction,
masking, anesthesia, and the like--inhibits or destroys the functions
listed here."Baars, 1988, p. 356. Though Baars is talking about the
function of "conscious experience", he does have a tendency to combine
P-consciousness with A-consciousness under this heading.

Schacter (1989) approvingly quotes Marcel, using this reasoning to some
extent in formulating the model of Figure 1 (though as I mentioned, there
is a model that perhaps more fully embodies this reasoning--see below).
The P-consciousness module has the function of integrating information from
the specialized modules, injecting them with P-conscious content, and of
sending these contents to the system that is in charge of reasoning and
rational control of action and reporting.

This is the fallacy: In the blindsight patient, both P-consciousness and
A-consciousness of the glass of water are missing. There is an obvious
explanation of why the patient doesn't reach for the glass in terms of the
information about it not reaching mechanisms of reasoning and rational
control of speech and action, the machinery of A-consciousness. (If we
believe in an Executive system, we can explain why the blindsight patient
does not reach for the water by appealing to the claim that the information
about the water does not reach the Executive system.) More generally,
A-consciousness and P-consciousness are almost always present or absent
together, or rather this seems plausible. This is, after all, [why] they
are folded together in a mongrel concept. A function of the mechanisms
underlying A-consciousness is completely obvious. If information from the
senses did not get to mechanisms of control of reasoning and of rational
control of action and reporting, we would not be able to use our senses to
guide our action and reporting. But it is just a mistake to slide from a
function of the machinery of A-consciousness to any function at all of
P-consciousness.

Of course, it could be that the lack of P-consciousness is itself
responsible for the lack of A-consciousness. If [that] is the argument
in any of these cases, I do not say "fallacy". The idea that the lack of
P-consciousness is responsible for the lack of A-consciousness is a bold
hypothesis, not a fallacy. Recall, however, that there is some reason to
ascribe the opposite view to the field as a whole. The discussion earlier
of Baars, Shallice, Kosslyn and Koenig, Edelman, Johnson-Laird, Andrade and
Kihlstrom, et.al. suggested that to the extent that the different
consciousnesses are distinguished from one another, it is often thought
that P-consciousness is a product of (or is identical to) cognitive
processing. In this climate of opinion, if P-consciousness and
A-consciousness were clearly distinguished, and something like the opposite
of the usual view of their relation advanced, we would expect some comment
on this fact, something that does not appear in any of the works cited.

The fallacy, then, is jumping from the premise that "consciousness" is
missing--without being clear about what kind of consciousness is
missing--to the conclusion that P-consciousness has a certain function. If
the distinction were seen clearly, the relevant possibilities could be
reasoned about. Perhaps the lack of P-consciousness causes the lack of
A-consciousness. Or perhaps the converse is the case: P-consciousness is
somehow a product of A-consciousness. Or both could be the result of
something else. If the distinction were clearly made, these alternatives
would come to the fore. The fallacy is failing to make the distinction,
rendering the alternatives invisible.

Note that the claim that P-consciousness is missing in blindsight is just
an assumption. I decided to take the blindsight patient's word for his
lack of P-consciousness of stimuli in the blind field. Maybe this
assumption is mistaken. But if it is, then the fallacy now under
discussion reduces to the fallacy of the Searle-Penfield reasoning: if the
assumption is wrong, if the blindsight patient [does] have
P-consciousness of stimuli in the blind field, then [only]
A-consciousness of the stimuli in the blind field is missing, so [of
course] we cannot draw the mentioned conclusion about the function of
P-consciousness from blindsight.

I said at the outset that although there was a serious fallacy in the
target reasoning, there was also something importantly right about it.
What is importantly right is this. In blindsight, both A-consciousness and
P-consciousness (I assume) are gone, just as in normal perception, both are
present. So blind-sight is yet another case in which P-consciousness and
A-consciousness are both present or both absent. Further, as I mentioned
earlier, cases of A-consciousness without P-consciousness, such as the
super-blindsight patient I described earlier do not appear to exist.
Training of blindsight patients has produced a number of phenomena that
look a bit like super-blindsight, but each such lead that I have pursued
has fizzled. This suggests an intimate relation between A-consciousness
and P-consciousness. Perhaps there is something about P-consciousness that
greases the wheels of accessibility. Perhaps P-consciousness is like the
liquid in a hydraulic computer, the means by which A-consciousness
operates. Alternatively, perhaps P-consciousness is the gateway to
mechanisms of access as in Schacter's model, in which case P-consciousness
would have the function Marcel, et. al. mention. Or perhaps
P-conscousness and A-consciousness even amount to much the same thing
empirically even though they differ conceptually, in which case
P-consciousness would also have the aforementioned function. Perhaps the
two are so entwined together that there is no empirical sense to the idea
of one without the other.

[THESE ARE FIGURE CAPTIONS ONLY: FIGURES THEMSELVES ARE ONLY AVAILABLE
IN THE PAPER VERSION]

Compare the model of Figure 1 (Schacter's model) with those of Figures 2
and 3. The model of Figure 2 is just like Schacter's model except that the
Executive system and the P-consciousness system are collapsed together. We
might call the hypothesis that is embodied in it the Collapse
Hypothesis. The Collapse Hypothesis should not be confused with
Marcel's (1988, p. 135-7) Identity Hypothesis, which hypothesizes that the
processing of stimuli is identical with consciousness of them. As Marcel
points out, blindsight and similar phenomena suggest that we can have
processing without consciousness. Figure 3 is a a variant on Schacter's
model in which the Executive module and the P-consciousness module are
reversed. Schacter's model clearly gives P-consciousness a function in
controlling action. Model 3 clearly gives it no function. Model 2 can be
interpreted in a variety of ways, some of which give P-consciousness a
function, others of which do not. If P-consciousness is literally
identical to some sort of information processing, then P-consciousness will
have whatever function that information processing has. But if
P-consciousness is, say, a by-product of and supervenient on certain kinds
of information processing (something that could also be represented by
model 3), then P-consciousness will in that respect at least have no
function. What is right about the Marcel, et. al. reasoning is that some
of the explanations for the phenomenon give P-consciousness a role; what is
wrong with the reasoning is that one cannot immediately conclude from
missing "consciousness" to P-consciousness having that role.

CAN WE DISTINGUISH AMONG THE MODELS?

I'm finished with the point of the paper, but having raised the issue of
the three competing models, I can't resist making some suggestions for
distinguishing among them. My approach is one that takes introspection
seriously. Famously, introspection has its problems (Nisbett and Wilson,
1977;Jacoby, Toth, Lindsay and Debner, 1992), but it would be foolish to
conclude that we can afford to ignore our own experience.

One phenomenon that counts against the Collapse Hypothesis (Model 2) is the
familiar phenomenon of the solution to a difficult problem just popping
into P-consciousness. If the solution involves high level thought, then it
must be done by high level reasoning processes that are not P-conscious.
(They aren't A-conscious either, since one can't report or base action on
the intermediate stages of such reasoning.) There will always be disputes
about famous cases (e.g. Kekule's discovery of the benzene ring in a
dream), but we should not be skeptical about the idea that though the
results of thought are both P-conscious and A-conscious, much in the way of
the intermediate stages are neither. If we assume that all high-level
reasoning is done in the Executive system, and that Model 2 is committed to
all Executive processes being P-conscious, then Model 2 is incompatible
with solutions popping into P-consciousness. Of course, alternative forms
of Model 2 that do not make these assumptions may not make any such
predictions.

I think there are a number of phenomena that, if investigated further,
might lead to evidence for P-consciousness without A-consciousness and thus
provide some reason to reject 2 in favor of Schacter's model (Figure 1).
(I also think that these phenomena, if investigated further, might yield
some reason to reject 3 in favor of 1, but I cannot go into that here.)
I repeat: the phenomena I am about to mention don't show anything on their
own. I claim only that they are intriguing and deserve further work.

One such phenomenon--or perhaps I should describe it as an idea rather than
a phenomenon--is the hypothesis, already mentioned, that there could be
animals whose P-conscious brain processes are intact, but whose A-conscious
brain processes are not. Another is the case mentioned earlier of states
of P-consciousness that go on for some time without attention and only
become A-conscious with the focusing of attention. (See also Hill, 1991.)

Sperling (1960) flashed arrays of letters (e.g. 3 by 3) to subjects for
brief periods (e.g. 50 milliseconds). Subjects typically said that they
could see all or most of the letters, but they could report only about half
of them. Were the subjects right in saying that they could see all the
letters? Sperling tried signalling the subjects with a tone. A high tone
meant the subject was to report the top row, a medium tone indicated the
middle row, etc. If the tone was given immediately after the stimulus, the
subjects could usually get all the letters in the row, whichever row was
indicated. But once they had named those letters, they usually could name
no others. This experiment is taken to indicate some sort of raw visual
storage, the "icon". But the crucial issue for my purposes is what it is
like to be a subject in this experiment. My own experience is that I see
all or almost all the letters, and this is what other subjects describe
(Baars, 1988, p. 15). Focusing on one row allows me to report what
letters are in that row, (and only that row) and again this is what other
subjects report. Here is the description that I [think] is right and
that I need for my case: I am P-conscious of all (or almost all--I'll omit
this qualification) the letters at once, that is jointly, and not just as
blurry or vague letters, but as specific letters (or at least specific
shapes), but I don't have access to all of them jointly, all at once. (I
would like to know whether others describe what it is like in this way, but
the prejudice against introspection in psychology tends to keep answers to
such questions from the journals.) One item of uncertainty about this
phenomenon is that responses are serial; perhaps if some parallel form of
response were available the results would be different. Ignoring that
issue, the suggestion is that I am P-conscious, but not A-conscious, of all
jointly. I am indebted to Jerry Fodor here.

It may be that some evidence for P-consciousness without A-consciousness
can be derived from phenomena involving hypnosis. Consider the phenomenon
known as hypnotic analgesia in which hypnosis blocks a patient's access to
pain, say from an arm in cold water or from the dentist's drill. Pain must
be P-conscious, it might be said, but access is blocked by the hypnosis, so
perhaps this is P without A-consciousness? But what reason is there to
think that there is any pain at all in cases of hypnotic analgesia? One
reason is that there are the normal psychophysiological indications that
would be expected for pain of the sort that would be caused by the
stimulus, such as an increase in heart rate and blood pressure. (Melzack
and Wall, 1988; Kihlstrom, et. al., 1992) Another (flakier) indication is
that reports of the pain apparently can be elicited by Hilgard's "hidden
observer" technique in which the hypnotist tries to make contact with a
"hidden part" of the person who knows about the pain (Hilgard, 1986;
Kihlstrom, 1987). The hidden observer often describes the pain as
excruciating and also describes the time course of the pain in a way that
fits the stimulation. Now there is no point in supposing that the pain is
not P-conscious. If we believe the hidden observer, there is a pain that
has phenomenal properties, and phenomenal properties could not be
P-unconscious.

One way to think about this situation is that we have different persons
sharing some part of one body. The pain is both P-conscious and
A-conscious to the system that reports as the "hidden observer". This
system doesn't control behavior, but since it can report, it may have that
capacity under some circumstances. This reasoning is supported by the idea
that if there is a P-conscious state in me that I don't have access to,
then that state is not [mine] at all. A different way of thinking about
what is going on is that there is one system, [the person], who has some
sort of dissociation problem. There is P-conscious pain in there
somewhere, but the person, himself or herself, does not have access to that
pain, as shown by the failure to report it, and by the failure to use the
information to escape the pain. Only on this latter view would we have P
without A-consciousness.

Another phenomenon that could lead to evidence of P without A-consciousness
has to do with persistent reports over the years of P-conscious events
under general anesthesia. Patients wake up and say that the operation
hurt. (A number of doctors have told me that this is why doctors make a
point of zapping patients with intraveinous valium, a known amnestic, to
wipe out memory of the pain. If the patients don't remember the pain, they
won't sue.) General anesthesia is thought to suppress reasoning power in
subanesthetic doses (Kihlstrom, 1987; See also Ghoneim, M.M., et. al.,
1984), thus plausibly interfering with Executive function and
A-consciousness, but I know of no reports that would suggest diminished
P-consciousness. If P-consciousness were diminished much more than
A-consciousness, for example, we could perhaps have analogs of
super-blindsight, though I'm not sure how it would manifest itself. So if
there are P-conscious states under general anesthetic, they may be states
of more or less normal P-consciousness with diminished A-consciousness.
Further, Crick and Koch (1990) mention that the aforementioned neural
oscillations persist under light general anesthetic. Kihlstrom and
Schacter, 1990, Kihlstrom and Couture, 1992, and Ghoneim and Block, 1993,
conclude that the phenomenon depends in ways that are not understood on
details of the procedure and the anesthetic cocktail, but there do appear
to be some methods that show some kind of memory for events under
anesthesia. Bennett, et. al. (1988) gave some patients under anesthesia
suggestions to lift their index fingers at a special signal, whereas other
patients were told to pull their ears. Control groups were given similar
procedures without the suggestions. The result: the experimental group
exhibited the designated actions at a much higher rate than controls. Of
course, even if these results hold up, they don't show that the patients
[heard] the suggestions under anesthesia. Perhaps what took place was
some sort of auditory analog of blindsight.

An item of more use for present purposes comes from a study done on pilots
during WW II by a pair of American dentists (Nathan, 1985, Melzack and
Wall, 1988). The unpressurized cabins of the time caused pilots to
experience sensations that as I understand it amount to some sort of
re-creation of the pain of previous dental work. The mechanism appeared to
have to do with stimulation of the sinuses caused by the air pressure
changes. The dentists coined the term `aerodontalgia' for this phenomenon.
The dentists were interested in the relation of aerodontalgia to general
and local anesthetic. So they did dental work on patients using
combinations of general and local anesthetics. For example, they would put
a patient under general anesthetic, and then locally anesthetize one side
of the mouth, and then drill or pull teeth on both sides. The result (with
stimulation of the nasal mucosa in place of the sinus stimulation caused by
pressure changes): they found recreation of pain of previous dental work
only for dental work done under general anesthesia, not for local
anesthesia, whether or not the local was used alone or together with
general anesthesia. Of course, there may have been no pain at all under
general anesthesia, only memories of the sort that would have been laid
down if there had been pain. But if you hate pain, and if both general and
local anesthesia make medical sense, would [you] take the chance on
general anesthesia? At any rate, the tantalizing suggestion is that this
is a case of P-consciousness without A-consciousness.

The form of the target reasoning discussed misses the distinction between
P-consciousness and A-consciousness and thus jumps from the fact that
consciousness in some sense or other is missing simultaneously with missing
creativity or voluntary action to the conclusion that P-consciousness
functions to promote the missing qualities in normal people. But if we
make the right distinctions, we can investigate non-fallaciously whether
any such conclusion can be drawn. Model 2 would identify P-consciousness
with A-consciousness, thus embodying an aspect of the target reasoning.
But Model 2 is disconfirmed by the apparent fact that much of our reasoning
is neither P-conscious nor A-conscious. I have made further suggestions
for phenomena that may provide examples of P-consciousness without
A-consciousness, further disconfirming Model 2.

My purpose in this paper has been to expose a confusion about
consciousness. But in reasoning about it I raised the possibilty that it
may be possible to find out something about the function of P-consciousness
without knowing very much about what it is. Indeed, learning something
about the function of P-consciousness may help us in finding out what it
is. I would like to thank Tyler Burge, Susan Carey, Martin Davies,
Bert Dreyfus, Paul Horwich, Jerry Katz, Leonard Katz, Joe Levine, David
Rosenthal, Jerome Schaffer, Sydney Shoemaker, Stephen White and Andrew
Young for their very helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper. I
am also grateful to many audiences at talks on this material for their
criticisms, especially the audience at the conference on my work at the
University of Barcelona in June, 1993.

NOTES

1. See Bowers and Schacter, 1990, and Reingold and Merikle, 1990. The
phenomenon just mentioned is very similar to phenomena involving
"subliminal perception", in which stimuli are degraded or presented
very briefly. Holender (1986) harshly criticises a variety of
"subliminal perception" experiments, but the experimental paradigm just
mentioned and many others, are in my judgement, free from the problems
of some other studies. Another such experimental paradigm is the
familiar dichotic listening experiments in which subjects wear
headphones in which different programs are played to different ears. If
they are asked to pay attention to one program, they can report only
superficial features of the unattended program, but the unattended
program influences interpretation of ambiguous sentences presented in
the attended program.See Lackner and Garrett, 1973.

2. See, for example, Dennett and Kinsbourne's (1992b) scorn in response
to my suggestion of Cartesian Modularism. I should add that in
Dennett's more recent writings, Cartesian materialism has tended to
expand considerably from its original meaning of a literal place in the
brain at which "it all comes together" for consciousness. In reply to
Shoemaker 1993 and Tye 1993, both of whom echo Dennett's (1991) and
Dennett's and Kinsbourne's (1992a) admission that no one really is a
proponent of Cartesian materialism, Dennett 1993 says "Indeed, if Tye
and Shoemaker want to see a card-carrying Cartesian materialist, each
may look in the mirror..." See also Jackson 1993.

3. But what is it about thoughts that makes them P-conscious? One
possibility is that it is just a series of mental images or
subvocalizations that make thoughts P-conscious. Another
possibility is that the contents themselves have a P-conscious
aspect independently of their vehicles. See Lormand,
forthcoming.

4. I say both that P-consciousness is not an intentional property and
that intentional differences can make a P-conscious difference. My view
is that although P- conscious content cannot be reduced to intentional
content, P-conscious contents often have an intentional aspect, and
also P-conscious contents often represent in a primitive
non-intentional way.A perceptual experience can represent space as
being filled in certain ways without representing the object perceived
as falling under any concept. Thus, the experiences of a creature which
does not possess the concept of a donut could represent space as being
filled in a donut-like way. See Davies (1992, forthcoming), Peacocke
(1992), and finally Evans (1982), in which the distinction between
conceptualized and non-conceptualized content is first introduced.

5. Levine (1983) coined the term "explanatory gap", and has elaborated
the idea in interesting ways; see also his (1993). Van Gulick (1993)
and Flanagan (1992, p. 59) note that the more we know about the
connection between (say) hitting middle C on the piano and the
resulting experience, the more we have in the way of hooks on which to
hang something that could potentially close the explanatory gap. Some
philosophers have adopted what might be called a deflationary attitude
towards the explanatory gap. See Levine (1993), Jackson (1993) and
Chalmers (1993), Byrne (1993) and Block (1994).

6. I know some will think that I invoked inverted and absent qualia a
few paragraphs above when I described the explanatory gap as involving
the question of why a creature with a brain with a physiological and
functional nature like ours couldn't have different experience or none
at all. But the spirit of the question as I asked it allows for an
answer that explains why such creatures cannot exist, and thus there is
no presupposition that these are real possibilities. Levine (1983,
1993) stresses that the relevant modality is epistemic possibility.

7. What if an A-unconscious state causes an A-conscious state with the
same content?Then it could be said that the first state must be
A-conscious because it is in virtue of having that state that the
content it shares with the other state satisfies the three conditions.
So the state is A- unconscious by hypothesis, but A-conscious by my
definition. (I am indebted to Paul Horwich.) I think what this case
points to is a refinement needed in the notion of "in virtue of".One
does not want to count the inferential promiscuity of a content as
being in virtue of having a state if that state can only cause this
inferential promiscuity via another state. I won't try to produce an
analysis of `in virtue of' here.

8. I have been using the P-consciousness/A- consciousness distinction
in my lectures for many years, but it only found its way into print in
my "Consciousness and Accessibility" (1990b), and my (1991, 1992,
1993). My claims about the distinction have been criticized in Searle
(1990b, 1992) and Flanagan (1992); and there is an illuminating
discussion in Humphreys and Davies (1993b), a point of which will be
taken up in a footnote to follow. See also Levine's (1994) review of
Flanagan which discusses Flanagan's critique of the distinction. See
also Kirk (1992) for an identification of P-consciousness with
something like A-consciousness.

9. Some may say that only fully conceptualized content can play a role
in reasoning, be reportable, and rationally control action. If so, then
non-conceptualized content is not A-conscious.

10. However, I acknowledge the empirical possibility that the
scientific nature of P-consciousness is something to do with
information processing. We can ill afford to close off empirical
possibilities given the difficulty of solving the mystery of
P-consciousness. Cf.Loar, 1990.

11. On my view, there are a number of problems with the first of these
suggestions. One of them is that perhaps the representational content
of pain is too primitive for a role in inference. Arguably, the
representational content of pain is non-conceptualized. After all, dogs
can have pain and one can reasonably wonder whether dogs have the
relevant concepts at all. Davies and Humphreys (1993b) discuss a
related issue. Applying a suggestion of theirs about the higher order
thought notion of consciousness to A- consciousness, we could
characterize A-consciousness of a state with non-conceptualized content
as follows: such a state is A-conscious if, in virtue of one's having
the state, its content would be inferentially promiscuous and available
for rational control of action and speech if the subject were to have
had the concepts required for that content to be a conceptualized
content. The idea is to bypass the inferential disadvantage of
non-conceptualized content by thinking of its accessibility
counterfactually-- in terms of the rational relations it would have if
the subject were to have the relevant concepts. See Lormand
(forthcoming) on the self-representing nature of pain.

12. Later in this paper I introduce the distinction between creature
consciousness and state consciousness. In those terms, transitivity has
to do primarily with creature consciousness, whereas in the case of
P-consciousness and A- consciousness, it is state consciousness which
is basic. See the discussion at the end of this section.

13. The distinction has some similarity to the sensation/perception
distinction; I won't take the space to lay out the differences. See
Humphrey (1992) for an interesting discussion of the latter
distinction.

14. Tye, forthcoming argues (on the basis of a neuropsychological
claims) that the visual information processing in blindsight includes
no processing by the object recognition system or the spatial attention
system, and so is very different from the processing of normal vision.
This point does not challenge my claim that the super-blindsight case
is a very limited partial zombie. Note that super-blindsight, as I
describe it does not require object recognition or spatial attention.
Whatever it is that allows the blindsight patient to discriminate an
`X' from an `O' and a horizontal from a vertical line will do. I will
argue later that the fact that such cases do not exist, if it is a
fact, is important. Humphrey (1992) suggests that blindsight is mainly
a motor phenomenon--the patient is perceptually influenced by his own
motor tendencies.

15. If you are tempted to deny the existence of these states of the
perceptual system, you should think back to the total zombie just
mentioned. Putting aside the issue of the possibility of this zombie,
note that on a computational notion of cognition, the zombie has all
the same A-conscious contents that you have (if he is your
computational duplicate). A-consciousness is an informational notion.
The states of the super-blindsighter's perceptual system are
A-conscious for the same reason as the zombie's.

16. Actually, my notion of A-consciousness seems to fit the data better
than the conceptual apparatus she uses. Blindsight isn't always more
degraded in any normal sense than sight. Weiskrantz (1988) notes that
his patient DB had better acuity in some areas of the blind field (in
some circumstances) than in his sighted field. It would be better to
understand her "degraded" in terms of lack of access.
Notice that the super-blindsighter I have described is just a little
bit different (though in a crucial way) from the ordinary blindsight
patient. In particular, I am not relying on what might be thought of as
a full-fledged quasi- zombie, a super-duper-blindsighter whose
blindsight is every bit as good, functionally speaking, as his sight.
In the case of the super-duper blindsighter, the only difference
between vision in the blind and sighted fields, functionally speaking,
is that the quasi-zombie himself regards them differently.Such an
example will be regarded by some (though not me) as incoherent--see
Dennett, 1991, for example. But we can avoid disagreement about the
super- duper-blindsighter by illustrating the idea of A- consciousness
without P-consciousness by appealing only to the super-blindsighter.
Functionalists may want to know why the super-blindsight case counts as
A-conscious without P- consciousness. After all, they may say, if we
have really high quality access in mind, the super-blindsighter that I
have described does not have it, so he lacks both P- consciousness and
really high quality A-consciousness. The super-duper-blindsighter, on
the other hand, has both, according to the functionalist, so in neither
case, the objection goes, is there A-consciousness without P-
consciousness. But the disagreement about the super-duper- blindsighter
is irrelevant to the issue about the super- blindsighter, and the issue
about the super-blindsighter is merely verbal. I have chosen a notion
of A-consciousness whose standards are lower in part to avoid conflict
with the functionalist. I believe in the possibility of a quasi- zombie
like the super-duper-blindsighter, but the point I am making here does
not depend on it. There is no reason to frame notions so as to muddy
the waters with unnecessary conflicts when the point I am making in
this paper is one that functionalists can have some agreement with. One
could put the point by distinguishing three types of access: (1) really
high quality access, (2) medium access and (3) poor access. The actual
blindsight patient has poor access, the super-blindsight patient has
medium access and the super- duper blindsight patient--as well as most
of us--has really high quality access.The functionalist identifies P-
consciousness with A-consciousness of the really high quality kind. I
am defining `A-consciousness'--and of course, it is only one of many
possible definitions--in terms of medium access, both to avoid
unnecessary conflict with the functionalist, and also so as to reveal
the fallacy of the target reasoning. I choose medium instead of really
high quality access for the former purpose, and I choose medium instead
of poor access for the latter purpose. Though functionalists should
agree with me that there can be A-consciousness without
P-consciousness, some functionalists will see the significance of such
cases very differently from the way I see them. Some functionalists
will see the distinction between A-consciousness and P-consciousness as
primarily a difference in degree rather than a difference in kind, as
is suggested by the contrast between really high quality access and
medium access. So all that A- consciousness without P-consciousness
illustrates, on this functionalist view, is some access without more
access. Other functionalists will stress kind of information processing
rather than amount of it.The thought behind this approach is that there
is no reason to think that the P-consciousness of animals whose
capacities for reasoning, reporting and rational guidance of action are
more limited than ours thereby have anything less in the way of P-
consciousness. The functionalist can concede that this thought is
correct, and thereby treat the difference between A-consciousness and
P-consciousness as a difference of kind, albeit kind of information
processing.

17. Thus, there is a conflict between this physiological claim and the
Schacter model which dictates that destroying the P-consciousness
module will prevent A- consciousness.

18. There is a misleading aspect to this example-- namely that to the
extent that `conscious' and `aware' differ in ordinary talk, the
difference goes in the opposite direction.

19. Of course, even those who don't belief in P- consciousness at all,
as distinct from A-consciousness, can accept the distinction between a
noise that is A-conscious and a noise that is not A-conscious. There is
a more familiar situation which illustrates the same points. Think back
to all those times when you have been sitting in the kitchen when
suddenly the compressor in the refrigerator goes off. Again, one might
naturally say that one was aware of the noise, but only at the moment
in which it went off was one consciously aware of it. I didn't use this
example because I am not sure that one really has P-consciousness of
the noise of the compressor all along; habituation would perhaps
prevent it. Perhaps what happens at the moment it goes off is that one
is P-conscious of the change only.

20. See White (1987) for an account of why self- consciousness should
be firmly distinguished from P- consciousness, and why
self-consciousness is more relevant to certain issues of value.

21. The pioneer of these ideas in the philosophical literature is David
Armstrong (1968, 1980). William Lycan (1987) has energetically pursued
self-scanning, and David Rosenthal (1986, 1993), Peter Carruthers
(1989, 1992) and Norton Nelkin (1993) have championed higher order
thought. See also Natsoulas (1993) Lormand (forthcoming) makes some
powerful criticisms of Rosenthal.

22. To be fair to Rey, his argument is more like a dilemma: for any
supposed feature of consciousness, either a laptop of the sort we have
today has it or else you can't be sure you have it yourself. So in the
case of P- consciousness, the focus might be on the latter disjunct.

23. Interestingly, she was in many respects much worse at many
face-perception tasks than LH (the prosopagnosic mentioned
earlier)--she couldn't match photographs of faces, for example.I have
noticed that people who know little about anosognosia tend to favor
various debunking hypotheses. That is, they assume that the
experimenters have made one or another silly mistake in describing the
syndrome, because, after all, how could anyone fail to notice that they
can't recognize faces, or worse, that they are blind. See Young, et.
al., 1993, for a good debunking of the debunking hypotheses.

24. There is an additional problem in the reasoning that I won't go
into except here. There is a well-known difficulty in reasoning of the
form: X is missing; the patient has lost the ability to do blah-blah;
therefore a function of X is to facilitate blah-blahing.In a complex
system, a loss may reverberate through the system, triggering a variety
of malfunctions that are not connected in any serious way with the
function of the missing item. An imperfect but memorable example (that
I heard from Tom Bever) will illustrate: the Martians want to find out
about the function of various Earthly items. They begin with The
Pentagon, and focus in on a particular drinking fountain in a hall on
the third floor of the North side of the building. "If we can figure
out what that is for", they think, "we can move on to something more
complex." So they vaporize the drinking fountain, causing noise and
spurting pipes. Everyone comes out of their office to see what happened
and the Martians conclude that the function of the fountain was to keep
people in their offices. The application of this point to the petit mal
case is that even if I am right that it is A-consciousness, not
P-consciousness, that is diminished or missing, I would not jump to the
conclusion that A-consciousness has a function of adding powers of
discrimination, flexibility and creativity. Creativity, for example,
may have its sources in the unA-conscious, requiring powers of
reasoning and control of action and reporting only for its expression.

25. Indeed, in the italicized passage above (italics mine) there is an
implicit suggestion that perhaps there are P-conscious events of which
no record is made. I could only find one place in the book where
Penfield says anything that might be taken to contradict this
interpretation: "Thus, the automaton can walk through traffic as though
he were aware of all that he hears and sees, and so continue on his way
home. But he is aware of nothing and so makes no memory record. If a
policemen were to accost him he might consider the poor fellow to be
walking in his sleep." (60) But to properly understand this, we need to
know what he means by "awareness", and what he thinks goes on in sleep.
Judging by Penfield's use of synonyms, by "awareness" he means
something in the category of the higher order thought analyses or the
self-consciousness sense. For example, in discussing his peculiar view
that ants are conscious, he seems to use `conscious' and `aware' to
mean self-aware (62, 105, 106) Further, he makes it clear that although
the mind is shut off during sleep, the sensory cortex is quite active.

26. A similar line of reasoning appears in Shevrin, 1992; he notes that
in subliminal perception, we don't fix the source of a mental content.
Subliminal percepts aren't conscious, so consciousness must have the
function of fixing the source of mental contents.

27. Baars, 1988, p. 356. Though Baars is talking about the function of
"conscious experience", he does have a tendency to combine
P-consciousness with A-consciousness under this heading.

28. The Collapse Hypothesis should not be confused with Marcel's (1988,
p. 135-7) Identity Hypothesis, which hypothesizes that the processing
of stimuli is identical with consciousness of them. As Marcel points
out, blindsight and similar phenomena suggest that we can have
processing without consciousness.

29. I am indebted to Jerry Fodor here.

30. I would like to thank Tyler Burge, Susan Carey, Martin Davies, Bert
Dreyfus, Paul Horwich, Jerry Katz, Leonard Katz, Joe Levine, David
Rosenthal, Jerome Schaffer, Sydney Shoemaker, Stephen White and Andrew
Young for their very helpful comments on earlier versions of this
paper. I am also grateful to many audiences at talks on this material
for their criticisms, especially the audience at the conference on my
work at the University of Barcelona in June, 1993.

REFERENCES

Akins, K. (1993) A bat without qualities. In Davies and Humphreys (1993a)